📽️ A disconnect between intended and future uses of notes
# How can I bring my notes with me in my work?
# Existing literature on note-taking
- Emphasizes the value of notes generally
- Debates the impacts of note-taking media (paper vs. digital)
- Stresses the importance of notes as đź“– representational and accurate
- Positions notes as a part of other methods, like ethnography or interviews
Transcript
They also got me thinking, though. I had been meticulous in my note-taking, and this had served me quite well in my classes and research at the time. But once those projects had ended, it seems like the use of these notes had ended too: the notebook was closed and stored in a milk crate. And this doesn’t even consider the many half-baked ideas I have jotted on post-its or typed into Word files and note-taking apps over the years. There was evidently a disconnect between taking these notes and using them as I moved forward into new projects—a problem that seemed especially poignant as I was starting a PhD.
So I started looking into academic note-taking and retrieval practices. And despite the growing genre of academic “self-help” books, I didn’t find much on note-taking besides what I had already been doing. Most of the literature was aimed at students stressing the importance of note-taking in the first place. There were some paper-vs-digital debates—fascinating to analyse from a media studies perspective, but not what I was after here—and several articles describing the importance of accuracy and representation in note-taking as a part of other methods, like ethnographies or interviews. But none of these approaches talked about the long-term storage and retrieval of personal notes, and no one else seemed to share my problem with moving notes from the context of where I wrote them into new ones.Much methodological writing about note-taking within academic work focuses on its role in other research methods, especially in concert with methods like ethnography or interviews. These approaches tend to focus on ensuring that notes are as representational of their subjects as possible.