What is a Heurist Database? [Using a Heurist Database Part 1]

Earlier this year, before I decided to give up finding a digital solution to my note-taking problem (after trying many things, like a personal wiki and scrivener), I also found this really promising ~thing~ called Heurist. I tried it for a day or so, but was overwhelmed and confused by it (despite great and super quick response to the one email I sent the Heurist folks!) and, since I was without my ADHD meds at the time (and thus was not capable of thinking very well for any extended period of time), I just gave up, and switched to notecards.

Now that I'm back on my meds consistantly again, earlier this month I suddenly got the urge to give this program another try, and I am SO glad I did!

I find the connection between these utopians & the communities & the papers & the organizations, etc super fascinating, so I am building a thing I can use to keep better track of these connections as I research various people/communities. :)

— Ameya Warde (@ameyawarde) October 20, 2018

I tweeted the above this morning and it made me realize that I haven't posted about my current database project over here yet! So, I'm going to try to explain what I'm doing and how I'm doing it.

It's been a bunch of trial and error, and my Dr. Computer Scientist boyfriend helped me a little but I've finally gotten the hang of the program (I think?) and so I want to share how great it can be, along with some tips for how to set it up, in case anyone else is googling desperately to find a little guidance on this like I was. I still have a LOT to learn about this program's capabilities, but at least I'm feeling confident enough about the basics to share!

So, Heurist is a free data management system that researchers can use to manage, analyze & present their data, based out of the University of Sydney.

I am currently using it to keep track of all the utopian/intentional communities in the US (and some outside of it) before WWI, as well as all the people I can find involved in these experiments and the utopian/etc community in general.

Before this I had been working within a personal research wiki, but I felt the need to write coherently in full sentences on each page if I added anything, which slowed down my research and threw me out of my "groove" while I was researching.

A thing I like about the Heurist system is that I have been able to add a lot of fields where I can just plug in the info/ copy/paste a quote and the citation and then keep going. It helps me stay in the flow when I'm working, which is really important for me. I can go and turn them into proper sentences/writing later.

 

Heurist also allows me to link various records together with specified relationships, including those that have inverse relationships.

 

I really like that I don't have to constantly be compiling lists of, say, every Fourierist community, because it happens automatically as I create pages for each community. 

Right now I have the following record types (some came with the program and I don't need/know how to get rid of, like for the "digital media items"

I mostly use the record types:

• Person
• Community
• Organization
• Philosophy(/Religion)
• Historic Publications
• Utopian Works
• Misc/Other

Each record type has it's own template, thought it's rather hard to get a good screencap of, but here are just basic examples of the different templates for Person, Community, Philosophy and Historic Publication as of today:

Every template is definitely a work in progress. I make tweaks and changes to them every day in order to record more information or to be easier to navigate/add info to, etc.

I will make more posts in the future about different aspects of this program as I figure it all out. I'm finding it to be a really, really great for my current project!