Comment by autocorr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by autocorr | Hacker News Reader

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Zotero is simply a wonderful tool and I'm very grateful to the developers for it. As an academic, it is the only GUI program besides Firefox that I consider essential on one of my computers. Some of the features I enjoy:

* free software

* Linux and multi-platform support

* browser extension "that just works" for ingesting items and magic lookup tool for DOIs and arXiv IDs (and I hardly ever have problems with the metadata)

* shared group libraries for collaboration with students

* offline only as well as sync

* the ability to add notes, tags, and relational links between items.

After reading about Luhmann's Zettelkasten[1] system, I've also had a great productivity boost by implementing a similar scheme in Zotero. After reading an article, I write up a summary of my ideas and thoughts and attach it to the article as a literature note. I then keep a primary repository of notes in a flat folder with links between them and the literature notes as my makeshift Zettelkasten. While not as stream-lined as some special purpose note taking tools, Zotero can do a pretty decent job at this while also having all the advantages of it's bibliographic system, file syncing, etc.

Something I wish it had for this purpose was an "auto-complete" for other entries and a graphical tree viewer of relations. However, these aren't so bad not to have, part of the genius of Luhmann's original paper card notes system seems to have been the critical thinking required to determine which handful (1 to 3) of notes are most related and the serendipitous discovery process from having to manually walk the note files when you need to find something.

I love Zotero for my academic work, but I'm contemplating using it more for less formal research as well.

As Luhmann did, I'm trying to more frequently write summaries of articles—both actual academic articles and things like blog posts, news articles, even recipes. I prefer to handwrite these notes.

For web links, I was thinking of using pinboard's caching feature which assigns a url like https://pinboard.in/cached/01234567890a/ and recording down the 48-bit identifier.

Alas, what happens when my online service of choice fails? So, maybe the Zotero citation key?

I'm wondering what others' experiences are with hybrid written/digital research workflows, and cross-referencing. Anyone have a "personal DOI" that works really well?

For what it's worth, Pinboard also has an API that you can use to manage your data, including making backups.

I use it for exactly that, especially since he's quite upfront (and funny) about how hooped everyone could be if he's ever hit by a bus.

First thought for easy digitization of hand written notes is an iPad with pencil by your workstation. A BKM for integrating that into your Zotero workflow isn’t obvious though.

Does BKM stand for bookmark manager or something else? I tried searching for "BKM" but didn't come up with many (relevant looking) hits.

Best known method: "bkm acronym" came up with it as first result.

Did you mean to leave a footnote to Luhmann's Zettelkasten system?

I had never heard of it, but I found this article about it: https://medium.com/emvi/luhmanns-zettelkasten-a-productivity...

The book 'how to write smart notes' is a great writeup un that topic.

This post is quite good aswell: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettel...

That's the article I first read about it in. It's great, it really has the main ideas and how to implement it in a paper card system. The "How to Write Smart Notes" book is also great and a short read. It can get a little too pop-pyschology-esque in some parts for me (I just skimmed over those parts), but it is probably the most thorough writeup on Luhmann's system in English.

I think you might find Roam Research (http://roamresearch.com/) to be useful for this!

I'm currently contemplating how to use it as functionally as possible (categorise articles by subject? By hypothesis? Both?), so would love to chat about it if you'd like

Just wrote a short summary of my method to a friend. Might not be terribly readable for people who haven't used Roam, so take it for what it's worth. Hope it's for some use :-)

What I do is an interaction between the following:

Article <-> Tags <-> Hypotheses <-> Synthesis <-> Prediction <-> Research

So I might read an article, then tag the article/figures with the relevant tags. If it's for a specific project, I keep a list of tags on a separate page. This ensure that I use the tags consistently, so that I can find all the relevant articles later.

I purposefully keep the tags general, like "psychiatric conditions" rather than "depression, mania, schizophrenia" etc. When I reach the hypotheses page, this means that I can form relatively general hypotheses, and then nest them into gradually more specific hypothesis that are specifically supported by the articles.

Then, I use those hypotheses to form new predictions. These predictions turn into new research questions, which I either explore via the literature or doing my own experiments.

An example of this might be: "Wood 2018" <-> #Procedural Memory #Habits <-> Habits are part of procedural memory [[H]] <-> Habits are part of procedural memory [[H]] & Procedural memory is stored in the basal ganglia [[H]] <-> Damage to the basal ganglia disrupts habits [[H]] <-> Seger 2011

This affords me a lot of flexibility in total processing time; I don't spend a lot of time forming hypotheses that aren't interesting/necessary for me, I can quickly tag a lot of sources, and I can quickly collate those sources on a specific topic when necessary.

You might say that the first half of the workflow is "induction", the second half "deduction and confirmation".

I would love it if you had any questions or comments, but just writing this up has been useful for me as well.

Do you by any chance also have some experience with taking general (think college) notes in this way? I'm a STEM student and having a hard time with organising knowledge to be both useful on exams (i.e. containing hard facts, proofs) and _after_ them (i.e. containing intuition, connections). I'd be happy to chat about this as well.

You can shoot me an email on "mr [dot] sh4rpeye" at gmail.

> I then keep a primary repository of notes in a flat folder with links between them and the literature notes as my makeshift Zettelkasten

Could you give more details about this ? Do you sync the notes to a folder ? How do you do this ? And how to you browse your notes ?

Yes that was kind of vague! Zotero has an interface for taking simple text notes[1] that can either be stand-alone or attached to bibliographic entries like books or articles. In my Zotero library I have folders for different media like journal articles, conference proceedings, books, proposals, etc but don't organize them by subject. So for my literature notes I just attach them directly to the bibliographic entry. I usually try to keep these short and just write down interesting ideas or thoughts rather than summarizing the content (if they're short I'm more likely to actually write them!). As a separate folder in my Zotero library I just have one big pile of stand alone notes that I like to call my "memex" (analogous to Luhmann's Zettelkasten). By flat folder, I just meant that I don't attempt to organize the notes into a subject hierarchy (e.g., "galaxies / spiral / high-redshift"). The stand-alone notes can then be linked to each other with the "related items" feature (to other notes and relevant journal articles mostly). Luhmann's main insight I think was in not trying to impose a universal hierarchy on his writings but to organically grow a system of inter-connected thoughts through these item-to-item links. The mental act of identifying the most important links helps cultivate original thoughts. Needing to manually walk the notes puts you in a sort of conversation with yourself and means you engage with your past writings and ideas. Zotero isn't perfect for this, but the system is very simple, and can be done with paper cards, a single text file, a wiki, or special purpose software. But since my most frequent work flow is "thoughts related to journal articles", Zotero's bibliographic functions and the fact that that's where the PDF files are, make it much simpler to use for me than a stand alone tool.

[1] https://www.zotero.org/support/notes

I implemented the zettelkastem system with vimwiki for myself and I think it's great for that if you are into vim.

DynaList might complement your approach, for the earlier unstructured collection and task brainstorming

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