Question about note taking
Hypertext-infused philosophy personal database software
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@jasonwinning If you would humour a stranger from the Internet: how do you go about taking notes for readings? I am an aspiring (maybe foolheartedly) postgraduate philosophy student and I find it very difficult to both understand a work, and remembering the salient points, arguments, assumptions, etc.
Thank you !
Hi,
The first thing to say is that note-taking is very subjective and if you ask 5 (even very successful) philosophers how this should be done, they are likely to give you 5 very different answers and even (not exaggerating!) to tell you the other answers are wrong. It depends a lot on your personal learning style, thinking style, reading style, organizational habits, etc.
That said, I can tell you that I take notes from a work in multiple passes. On the first pass, I browse or skim through it for a few minutes to figure out a) what is the question/debate that the author is concerned with, b) what is the position the author is taking (what is their thesis or main conclusion), and c) what kind of literature or who is the author responding to. You can often figure this out if it's an article by reading the abstract, introduction, conclusion, looking at the list of works cited, etc. If it's a book, the preface or introduction will often have a clear statement of these things as well as summaries of chapters. If it is hard to tell from those things, I might look at google scholar to figure out who is citing this article and read what citing articles say about it. Or, check to see if any Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles discuss it. In the case of a book, I often look for published reviews, which are often just a few pages each. Once I have some idea of these things I will have some idea whether I want to continue investing time in it.
Then I read the work digitally while digitally annotating the key points (usually between 1 annotation every few pages and 3 or 4 annotations per page), usually by highlighting, and I have a color scheme for highlighting. Light blue for places where the author is summarizing or stating main points, medium blue for where the author is stating the conclusion of the entire work, orange for definitions, and green or yellow for important sentences for understanding what's going on on the current page or section. I use purple highlighting if I find a sentence or a quotation that is important for more than just understanding the work in question (there may or may not be one of these in a whole book).
Once I'm done reading the whole work, I go back over all these annotations. Now I have a much better idea of what the author is saying and how it fits into the surrounding literature. Sometimes I decide the work wasn't that valuable or important after all and I don't do anything else (maybe mark in the Hypernomicon work record description a few notes that I read it and why it isn't that big a deal). Otherwise, this is the stage where I reconstruct the question/problem/debates the author is arguing about, and create the problem/debate records in Hypernomicon if needed. Then I create a position(s) for the position(s) the author argues for. Then I create argument records for those leading back to the work itself. I use my annotations to figure out how to write the descriptions for these records. I also might create term records for various concepts, and when the author refers to arguments being made by other authors, I might create position and argument records (and even work records) based on that as well, depending on how reliable I feel the author's sizing up of the dialectic is.
If there is a work that is extremely important and I want to analyze it really closely, however, I might additionally create an outline in the work record's description or even in a separate document, then create a misc. file record for that document and link to it from the work record. It is also possible to create a set of note records and link to those from the work record. So the workflow differs depending on how important the work in quetion is and how deeply I want to analyze it.
I thank you for the reply. The way you prepare for a work is interestingly how I typically approached it. I do worry about losing out on the physical writing of notes and remembering what I've written down longterm point.
I am also interested in your background, moving from the tech world into an academic one. I am trying to see if that's a move I should make myself--I have a lot of self-doubt in that regard. I look up to your case in my dire hopes!
Thanks again.
I think you're right that if someone is simply jotting down notes in an unstructured way, pencil and paper is probably better than electronic. But when you factor in all of the information structuring and accessibility and find-ability that you get with a database system like Hypernomicon, I think it becomes a much better tool for remembering things longterm than plain old pencil and paper.
Fortunately the move from tech to academia is one you can make in a stepwise way. You can start by reading more of the kinds of things academics write, and if you continue to be interested, enroll in an MA program. By the time you finish that you should know if you want to take the plunge into a PhD program or not.
Last edit: Jason Winning 2020-09-16
Thanks again. I don't know how old you were when you defended your thesis, or what motivated you to earn less money for the other worldly pleasures that can be had through philosophy (I only assume this is so for you as much as it is for me, of course!), but I am getting such long teeth to begin a penurious career like academic humanities. You seem to make it work, which is really cool.
I've only begun to look at hypernomicon. It seems rather comprehensive, which is great. And it runs on Linux!
I wonder how much use there is in introducing lightweight markup languages like Argdown for argument maps, or even Asciidoc or Markdown for notes.