Okay, but what the heck do I do with all these research notes?!?!

- me, for months.

I've tried a wiki, which, though it doesn't quite work for the note taking/collecting stage that I'm currently struggling with, I do generally like and will still probably be using further down my workflow pipeline (that is, unless I find a Heurist database more helpful than a straight up wiki for that stage, as this week I've been experimenting with that).

After realizing that it wasn't quite the thing for this stage of the research, I shifted over to Scrivener, where I first basically copied the format of a wiki page with each section getting it's own text (page/note), but allowing for more unstructured info and quotes, etc. But that still wasn't quite what I needed (duh, I say retrospectively.)

Then I found the idea of conceptual matrices (yes I spelled it wrong in Scrivener) that seem to work so well for things that aren't biographical research... I tried those, continuously having to break them down so each page wasn't getting so unwieldy, and so here I am now, with this total mess:

 

#REGRET

So, I've spent waaaay too much time the last couple of days trying to figure out what to do, looking into various possibilities (I do NOT understand how people use Evernote for this, I would simply DIE of overwhelm) (and TiddlyWiki sounded promising, but was super confusing and I gave up on that, too.)

Sooooo, what did I end up with after all this searching?

Why, the very system I was trying so hard to find a digital alternative for, of course!

Index Cards.

Credit goes to Ryan Holiday's Thought Catalog article The Notecard System: The Key For Remembering, Organizing And Using Everything You Read, in which he explains that index cards were:

"... responsible for helping me publish three books in three years, (along with other books I’ve had the privilege of contributing to), write countless articles published in newspapers and websites, send out my reading recommendations every month, and make all sorts of other work and personal successes possible."

Uh, yes please. I would like to have anything approaching that level of productivity!
Okay, okay. I should use the notecard system. But of course I then spent half a day trying to find an explicitly digital-index-card system (Scrivener's not counting bc I need a bazillion cards) because, trees! Hand cramping! Supply costs! Travel! Etc!

NoodleTools, though aimed at k-12 students, seemed pretty close, but then I just gave up. I don't want all my notes in such a closed system, anyway. I should just use the actual, physical cards.

So, I can't afford a printer to just print & paste things onto the cards, and my hand is already aching at the thought of what's to come, but I  know darn well that this is the best possible system that currently exists that works best for my brain.

My brain is weird, you see (I have severe ADHD..) and I really do work better with physical copies of things, though my millennial self generally prefers that which is digital and techie. But, ADHD brains in particular really do need things, especially information, to be "externalized" and physically manipulatable (our working memory is crap).

In fact, I thought to write this post after reading this article by fellow ADHDer Aimée Morrison at Hook & Eye this morning, in which she describes why she uses paper for research notes, which is the same reason physical copies work best for me, too:

For me, paper is visible in very important ways: scale, scope, the gist. How much progress I’m making, how much I have left. Where the holes are, sometimes literally. Paper is a massive memory aid, an externalization of my working memory, all the more crucial the larger or more complex a task becomes. Colour coded sticky notes and pens and paper clips and highlighting–I scan it from above and easily zoom down to what I need.

For me, electronic text is inscrutable and frustrating, like trying to watch a movie in the front row of the cinema with a pinhole camera: I can’t get any sense of scale or make sense of anything, and I get dizzy, to boot. There’s no way I could follow any kind of narrative and it’s a challenge not to barf. All the blue light, not enough screen, too many tabs and open windows and nothing findable. Stress nap!

I found this article to be super validating for me, especially since a few days ago I had already gone ahead and ordered some supplies! Thanks, Aimée! :)


Woops this post turned out way longer than intended, but I realized I should make a record of all the things I looked into first, so I don't forget and do this whole thing over again next year!

Research Tool: Time.Graphics!

My current research involves not only a whole bunch of short-lived utopian communities spread across ~100 years, but also a ton of not-very-extensively-studied individuals from the same time period.

So, I have a lot of dates to deal with, and a lot of conflicting dates to try to make sense of.

After first trying to learn how to make a graphic timeline on my new Wiki (confusing, and definitely not good for a ton of info), I gave up and went hunting for a free site that would let me visualize (& color code!) the information in a useful way.

ENTER: time.graphics! (who knew .graphics was a TLD/domain ending??)

I'm quite impressed with it so far, particularly as a free site. Being able to see all the communities I'm looking at in this way has been super helpful in understanding the context of everything I'm researching.

I also have a similar timeline with the lives of each person I'm looking at, and I'm starting to build individual timelines for each person as well. It's helped me catch a number of date contradictions from my sources!

There are a lot of features of this particular site that I haven't used, like the integration into Youtube, Google Calendar/Spreadsheet/Analytics/Maps and other things, so I can't really speak to those, but they're there!

That's it, really. I just wanted to share this since I've been finding it so useful!

My Personal Research Wiki.... IT IS BORN!!~

When I first started on my #homegradschooling journey, I remember coming across an article by a researcher (which for the life of me I can NOT find again), explaining why he loves using a personal wiki for his research, and he linked to his own. I loved the idea, but at the time I couldn't figure out how to use it for my own work.

This week, I realized that with my current research, a Wiki is a perfect way to organize the notes for my current research. So, I set out to build one!

 And it took me A. WHILE. (hours. Miserable, miserable hours!) to figure out how to make one (since I do not currently have webspace to simply host my own via MediaWiki). There was much googling, and much registering for sites that I poked around and now will probably never go back to, such as:

• Referata (Didn't have the infobox capability I needed)
• WikiSpaces (ditto above, also only was able to get a free wiki because I'm a teacher)
• ZohoWiki (Did allow for private wikis, but I don't think infoboxes)
• wiki-site.com -- I still am not sure if this one is even legit or not. Something seemed fishy for some reason, and I think it also didn't do infoboxes, so I didn't get much past registration.

But in the end, I went with the one I had actually heard of before, but never considered it as a possibility:

Wikia.com

I love it because:

• It allows Infoboxes!
• It's SO EASY to build infoboxes!
• It allows templates! Both *for* infoboxes, and for all aspects of each page!
• It's super easy to cite my sources 
• Other than the rather excessive pictoral links to other wikis on the bottom of the screen, it's by far the most attractive site of any other wiki I've ever seen.

It is, of course, not perfect.

• I wish it was easier to cite different pages from the same source without making totally new entries
• I wish it were easy to put a map into the infoboxes without having to screengrab/find/make a map elsewhere and then just put it in as an image.
• I wish I could make it private or members-only

But overall, I love it. 

Wiki advertises itself as a fandom wiki host/database, and while it is definitely that, it also invites personal Wikis, too. Best of all, not only does it ACTUALLY ALLOW INFOBOXES--- it has DRAG AND DROP Infobox builders!! I am so very grateful for not having to spend a ton of time trying to learn how to code stuff like that like you do on other wiki platforms. 

So beautiful ;__;

And I am nerding out to an incredible level about this so far. I have never before been so excited to type up notes and quotes! But seeing all this information coming together from all my disparate sources (I still don't know how the heck to organize paper research notes) is kinda thrilling, tbh. Especially since I really am finding so much more information on some of these people than seems to have been found and gathered by a single writer before me. Especially with Marie Stevens Case Howland, it feels like I'm the first person to ever see *all* of her life, and in context before. There's definitely something special about that for history lovers like myself.

I'm not sure if I'll ever show my research on this wiki (though when I'm done I'll definitely be transferring most of the information onto Wikipedia itself), but here, check out the size differences between Marie's Wikipedia page (left) and her barely half-done page on my wiki (right):

BAM. And actually I didn't even have any notes on Marie yet, but I was practicing with my wiki templates and just started working on her because one of my books was open to the chapter on her, and so then I went from there. And I still have managed this much so far, and I'm super excited about how it's turning out. I've been working on some other pages, including those for things I did have some notes on, and they're, obviously, even longer.

I spend so much time reading books and taking notes in pages that end up massively disorganized if not all together lost (ADHD will do that..), that my excitement is probably stemming from the fact that for once, the work I've been doing is VISUALIZED (and this is a big and important thing for ADHDers, for reasons I don't have time to explain atm). Suddenly, especially as an independent researcher, I feel SO much less like I've just been wasting time and accomplishing nothing but reading. I finally feel like the thing which in my head has been my project, can actually be recognized as "A PROJECT!" by others. My boyfriend is a fancy Ph.D. man, and even he is suddenly impressed. Feels good! 

But, I will tell you what. In all of my 30 years, I'm pretty sure that time has NEVER gone faster than it does when I'm excitedly working on this project. "i'm just going to work on this for a couple hour---OH NO HOW IS IT DINNER TIME ALREADY??!?!"

And honestly, that feels pretty good too. :)