Upgrade StorageOrganizing many, many notes for dissertation
Hello all,
I realize this may not be the correct forum to pose my question, but I'd appreciate any suggestions nonetheless. I'm in the process of writing a dissertation and am swamped by notes, quotes, and other miscellany. I've used two programs, OneNote and MindManager, to take these notes so they are all digital. I'm searching for a way to get a handle on the material, perhaps by creating a quick and dirty database or wiki.
Ideally, I'd like to be able to enter the notes as and index them in terms of the document they came from. However, I'd also like to be able to quickly cross-reference notes for specific terms and to be able to tag them with descriptors like "postmodernity," "novel," "Thomas Pynchon," and so on.
Zotero may well be up to the task, but I worry that the voluminous notes I have on works like _Gravity's Rainbow_ may choke the software. There is also the problem of preserving the structure I've imposed on the notes in MindManager.
Thanks for your time,
PiD
I realize this may not be the correct forum to pose my question, but I'd appreciate any suggestions nonetheless. I'm in the process of writing a dissertation and am swamped by notes, quotes, and other miscellany. I've used two programs, OneNote and MindManager, to take these notes so they are all digital. I'm searching for a way to get a handle on the material, perhaps by creating a quick and dirty database or wiki.
Ideally, I'd like to be able to enter the notes as and index them in terms of the document they came from. However, I'd also like to be able to quickly cross-reference notes for specific terms and to be able to tag them with descriptors like "postmodernity," "novel," "Thomas Pynchon," and so on.
Zotero may well be up to the task, but I worry that the voluminous notes I have on works like _Gravity's Rainbow_ may choke the software. There is also the problem of preserving the structure I've imposed on the notes in MindManager.
Thanks for your time,
PiD
Yup, it sure can. The export is a bit "ugly," but certainly workable.
Why?
Have a great one,
Paul K.
I don't know that this would suit you, though. It also depends on how you'd like to work with your notes. As far as I know, there is at present no way to export notes alone from Zotero, so it might be complicated to get them into a word processor, for example.
My understanding is that the database has an upper limit of 10,000 entries, with some slow-down possible starting from 5,000 items:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/815/?Focus=3076#Comment_3076
I'm not sure how, or whether, length of note would complicate matters.
Thanks for the suggestions.
I've looked at Nota Bene. It looks like a great program, but the price tag is a bit prohibitive, especially since the software is two(?) years old now.
Have you found it to be particularly useful?
PiD
http://www.gnome.org/projects/tomboy/features.html
If you're going to try Tomboy, you might also try Beagle, a desktop search engine that will allow you to do full-text searches on your Tomboy notes and other documents (including Zotero docs if you tell Beagle to index the Zotero storage folder). Some people don't like Beagle, but I find it a very helpful tool.
http://beagle-project.org/Main_Page
It should be possible to install both of these apps in any mainstream Linux distro using the included package manager if they are not included "out of the box" (not that Linux really comes in a box....). =)
Thanks for the suggestion. The Linux/Unix operating systems look incredibly stable and robust. However, I recently invested in a tablet pc and need to run a Windows OS, in my case Vista, to get the full tablet functionality.
Have a great morning,
PiD
I don't use Tomboy myself, but will point out that it can limp along in Windows:
http://live.gnome.org/Tomboy/Win32
I'll also point out that Linux supports the most common hot keys on tablets out-of-the-box with most distros & that you can easily install wacom-tools to enable stylus support. (Though this in no means cancels out any other valid reasons you might not to wish to run Linux--you should just know the fact that it is a tablet isn't necessarily a barrier).
A somewhat commonly suggested alternative to Tomboy is to actually use a wiki, which you mentioned initially. There are single file versions that use javascript & don't require a server & your citation data is already tied to your browser.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_wiki
Can you suggest a personal wiki?
TiddlyWiki (and various extensions) is probably the most popular personal wiki software, but I haven't used it much myself.
Melani
However, several people split across multiple tiddlywikis & the tiddlywiki ChangeLog shows that they have been adding features to help users who do this.
Are you searching via Quick Search? That can take a while if are full-text indexing. You'll find that searching goes faster if you open the advanced search window. If you want to solicit comments and advice, perhaps start a new thread, and see if you can gauge if your experience is 'normal' Don't forget to list OS, CPU speed and amount of computer memory, (and perhaps rough proportion of top-level items to attachments, and size of your database file zotero.sqlite).
www.thebrain.com
There's a free personal version of PersonalBrain, a powerful mindmapping software which helpes me in my research.
I've been trying to find a way to use zotero for my students so that they could save/make notes, and reorganize them. I've spent a couple of hours trying to do this--really no luck with easily moving notes around (in the program I use (infoselect) i just drag my notes into the order in which I'm going to write about them.
http://zim-wiki.org/ for linux it should be in the repository of the most distributions, and it's also installable under windows.