Academic use - workflow / hints, please?

That’s a very good point - I’m a massive visual thinker. But I was also balancing it with the fact that currently 80% of my study time is iOS and at least some of that 80% is iOS by necessity as I’m in situations where I can’t practically take my MacBook (eg, studying during work lunchtimes or on my commute).

I experimented today with creating Zettels with a simple markdown / text editor on iOS and importing into Tinderbox and there’s a lot of promise in this, although it would be even more promising if I could somehow automatically replicate the links in Tinderbox. I’m wary of making things too involved too soon, though, so I’m just leaving that (the overall use of Tinderbox) as a possibility for the future.

So I think my workflow at the moment is something like:

  • store documents in DEVONthink.
  • initial read in DEVONthink to get a feel for the relevance and usefulness of the paper / chapter.
  • (where necessary) share to MarginNote for detailed analytical reading, identifying concepts and creating proper notes rather than just highlights.
  • (Still a lot of work to do on refining my reading technique - so lots of opportunity for improvement here)
  • (maybe) exporting highlights and notes to pdf to file alongside document.
  • Updating or adding new zettels in markdown / text app (possibly The Archive on Mac, 1Writer on iPad), creating links to existing ones (still learning about this)
  • (possibly) using Tinderbox to ‘map’ imported zettels into visual representations of the specific question in seeming to answer.

I’ve still got a huge amount of thinking to do on the method, so this will change, I’m sure.

But I’m happy to report that my day in the library today was one of my most productive for a long time, even though I was grappling with a topic that’s new and confusing.

1 Like

What do you mean? Each note in Tinderbox has it’s own address, much the way Devonthink does. I’ve automated my process to the point that with two clicks in TBx, all my new Zettels are imported into Devonthink, with links between notes and titles maintained. It doesn’t work the other way round, though it’s likely possible, especially with the new versions of both apps.

At the moment, I’m creating new zettels as txt files in 1Writer,and linking them via their unique titles (very early days for me, both in terms of naming and linking. Naming is the unique numeric code generated from yyyymmddhhmmss plus relevant text description. Linking is via internal markdown (?) links, so [[yyyyymmddhhmmss Relevant description]]

When imported to tinderbox these are currently plain text, not links. I was mindlessly wondering whether there’s a way of doing something with those links on import. But as I say, probably too much thinking - better to focus on creating good zettels, linking in a useful way, etc.

Hello JKF ! I’m trying to make a short animation about my understanding of note organization and knowledge production from the perspective of academic research.

I have some simple thinking in this respect. I think mind-map can only help us to establish an understanding of the internal information structure of materials in the process of academic research, but it can not really help us to preserve our own perspective of problems and produce our own knowledge.

In the aspect of knowledge production, based on my own experience, I find that using the link function of marginote to create a local concept-map instead of mind-map can help us to simulate the flow process of thinking to the greatest extent, so as to discover knowledge through a unique perspective, rather than being limited to the category of notes arrangement.

I also got excited about this, but you just cannot do it on iOS. If there were some support for autocloud sync in both directions though, you could have Marginnote update pdfs in a Zotero-watched folder, and so you would add all your documents through MarginNote and they would be imported automatically to Zotero as the export synced. is this a reasonable #FeatureRequests ?

1 Like

Adding icons that corresponds with Ur hastags might be useful

This allows you locate easily you important notes

Example
#mostimpotant = lightbulb icon
#commoninmales = male icon

Please let us choose on what icon we want to put

Interesting. This is indeed what I need - a conceit map not a mindmap. I’ve used the link function but not really understood its potential. I’ll take another look, thank you

PhD Philosophy here.

I’ve only just started using MN intensively (e.g., for my work) recently. So there might be future improvements, but as of now I use:

  1. Papers3 for paper collection / reference management and skimming through papers;
  2. Ulysses for writing;
  3. MN for studying texts - instead of having mindmap side-by-side, I just delve into the text (2-page view), and have my highlights automatically added to the mindmap. Then, to review, I sort out the mindmap.

Hope this helps!

Hi Edward

The issue I’m finding with this is that linking the notes duplicates the text in each note. This is visually overwhelming.

So true! It completely destroys the point of making links between notes when the text or title is duplicated. At least for visual learners. I so much wish MarginNote could focus more on the link feature, making it equal to or more prominent than the child/branch system. Please allow free form linking and customization of links.

2 Likes

hi,

I just stumbeld upon the a quite interesting Note-Taking Tool, but which is still in development: www.roamresearch.com.

“A note-taking tool for networked thought.
As easy to use as a document. As powerful as a graph database. Roam helps you organize your research…”

I think the Idea to implement a Web of thoughts in Zettelkastenstyle is well considered here. An Idea with big potential?!

about: Roam Research – A note taking tool for networked thought.

I played with Roam for a while and I loved it. I’ve not moved to it though because they will start (quite rightly) charging at some point and there’s been some speculation that this might not be cheap, and if it is more than £10 a month, say, it’s out of my budget. So I don’t want to get locked into it until I know the cost.

Bart,
Thanks for such a splendid description of your workflow. It overlaps with mine more than 90%, and I still learned a few tricks from this and your other posts. I wonder if you could answer a quick question to help me avoid running down a rabbit hole. From your description, it seems that you read one document at a time in MN. Is that the case? If so, does that reduce the learning curve? Do you ever read multiple documents at the same time? If so, how does that work for you?

MN caught my eye because my current project involves about a dozen pdfs (around 30 pages each). There is considerable redundancy among them, and I’d like to be able to compare them to track the overlaps as well as to track the specific contribution of each document. I’ve thought about doing this in Tinderbox, but it’s possible that MN might work better for the task. My concern is the multiple warnings that MN could be quite a challenge to pick up, and there’s plenty of that already in the apps that we have in common.

Thanks!

Here is a mind-map (work in progress) of my various workflows, they require more explanation but happy to provide some if required.

3 Likes

Hi there, I am an academician too and I use MN3+Zotero+MsWord+icloud on Mac-iPad mini to build a Zettelkasten :card_file_box:. I took rough notes on MN than I export them to Zotero where I keep all my bibliography and notes, which can be created independently and related to each other or to a book.
I preferred MN over Liquidtext since one can start creating notebooks even without a source document and also documents can be used in different notebooks over and over again so does not took up too many storage.

1 Like

Wow, thanks for sharing, looks like your workflow is organized for every situation, cool!

@clarkie1977 This is great — thanks!

This is fantastic, thank you.

I note that you do pdf annotation in PDF Expert and synthesis in either MN or Liquidtext. Could you say a bit more about that, please? I can never decide when to stop using the annotation tool (I also use PDF Expert) and move to MN / LT - my ‘perfectionist’ brain doesn’t enjoy starting in one and moving to the other, but equally MN / LT get too cluttered with less relevant docs if I use them too early in the process.

Thanks for sharing this. Would it be possible for you to share any kind of pics that represent your work process? Thanks!

Hi, thank you for your detailed explanation.

I wonder if there were two same documents created in your storage system from your step 1-3.

I am confused how to organize my folders that all my documents put in, I hope all those documents could be linked to the library belongs to the MN3, other than I duplicated the document into MN3 each time. Is there any advice?