I've rarely been in an environment that has allowed for so much free, creative thinking as I am now at grad school. It's wonderfully refreshing and it makes me feel like I'm a kid in a candy store, but it also poses some challenges in how to organize one's ideas in such a way that they're mostly available within arm's reach for referencing, refactoring, or recording.
I have a few ideals in any such system:
- search, linking, and easy refactoring: This pretty much requires me to use a computer over the old school (and lovely) pen and paper journal approach.
- available anywhere, with or without my laptop: If I have to use a computer, I don't want to be restricted to always needing my laptop with me.
- works offline, too: If I happen to be lugging my laptop with me, it would be nice if everything could be available to me sans 'net connection.
My biggest current issue is how to organize my research notes. I'm reading and summarizing 10-15 research papers per week and I'm currently using Journler on my laptop. It does a pretty good job of organizing and comes with a pretty slick UI. I'm not crazy about it though because it doesn't satisfy my second condition very well. I've been thinking of experimenting with a personal wiki instead, maybe TWiki because I'm most familiar with it from work. Satisfying both of the latter conditions with a wiki would require some customizations, though.
Does anyone want to chime in and share strategies and/or ideas on software that work well for you?
3 Comments
1 Jorge
Posted September 24, 2007 at 5:07 pmPermalink
I've tried using a personal wiki on my USB key on and off for a while (TiddlyWiki), but somehow I always drop it a few weeks after picking it up again.
A lot of people I know use Bibsonomy, but that breaks your second condition too.
I ended up going back to basics and using a lab notebook. No searching and no linking, of course...
2 Jeremy
Posted September 26, 2007 at 10:02 pmPermalink
Neat, I didn't think about using a USB key. It might be cool to try setting up TiddlyWiki to sync with an online master copy. That way you could edit locally and sync with the online later. That seems like a decent option to explore so I'll check it out and report back.
Alas, if only we had the mythical Memex machine...
3 ToddyJ
Posted October 2, 2007 at 8:54 pmPermalink
I was going to suggest TiddlyWiki as well. There are derivatives that offer server sync, but I think I'd probably just dump it into Subversion or put it on my WebDAV space (at my mail provider).
My main complaint with TW is that the wikitext syntax is vomit.
Another Mac-based option is VoodooPad.
What really should exist is a generic wiki storage format, amenible to version control, separate from the front end. Then you could front it with a web server, a tiddly-style portable single doc view, or a voodoo-style rich editor. Wanna help me do it?