How I Organize and Create My Research Notes (Research Workflow++)

Key Takeaways

what's going on everyone today I'm going to talk about how I restructured my research workflow so I finally I'm not too recently but I recently finished the 400 page PDF of the Viking Age leatherwork than in New York for the time period of I think around 700 to 1100 AD but I was reading this long document taking notes and I put it in Mendeley I liked it for a hot minute but Mendeley it's even it can't really export your notes in a plain text format which as we know is the best because of all of the unix options and just plain text is king so I once again reconverted everything to another format and instead of doing my notes in markdown I decided because it's been all that effort delving into law tech and really getting in the weeds with some of the stuff I wanted it to do that I just took my own custom law tech template and made some law tech notes so what is my research workflow look like right now so I have a research directory in my home folder I have consolidated a few things I had books up here I had documents and I had that can go away but I had several of the things in here but in my research directory I have four main directories and in my bib my bibliography directory and then just some notes or some documents for me so my bib thought bib file and directory I went over all this in a prior video and it is a github repo on my github so you can check this out if you like it's just consolidating all my bibliographical references I use get bib - you know curl the results of a PDF DOI number and all that and then append it to any of these documents and one of these you know is that a papers and articles at a book consolidate it all into mega bib and then I reference the environmental variable that wrong environment there so I can I always reference my environmental variable bib and it tells me where it is research bid make a bib that's what I France so in my main research directory what is my workflow look like well just so I remember myself my workflow looks like what I have here on my document so I have a image directory because I like to have all my stuff externally referenced I actually have an image directories for when I do images in law tech so that way it's referencing a parent directory structure image and then inside of image it'll have the name of the PDF document I'm researching so this way everything is named the same so I could have a document like 2003 underscore leatherwork and that is the name of the PDF document that I am researching on or reading or whatever inside the same directory reading where I'm currently reading something currently I'm just just my prior stats class book but in there I would have the name of that file the name of that file with the word notes appended to it and it would be in a a tech file and then when I compile that tech file it would also be a PDF so each research subject item thing has three total files the original PDF the tech document was it has my notes and in the compiled notes PDF document now if I have images to put into my notes I would have them in the image directory under the name that is the name of that article in the PDF that way I could just search the name of that PDF in this entire directory in every item that has it would be pop-up so inside this I actually have the pictures to reference in my document like something like that yeah so that is like how the structure is working I have unread for things I'm still going to go through this is where books ended up I have a bunch of stuff in here I can need to move around still but some of these need to be moved but basically this is what I have to read what I'm currently reading right now and then what I finished and so you can see like my finished product for my Viking research is the original document which looks like this if I could get it pulling up so like this is the original document you can see it's like almost 400 pages and then I have my notes tech document a lot of law tech I think it's like 2,000 lines but yeah and the compiled notes and I have it formatted the way I have my formatting set on my article template also on github and I have my images inserted in here just the way I want them so the way I work that is in my preamble I have my graphics path for the graphic graphic X package and just says parent directory image in the name of the PDF itself and that is a directory and inside there are all my images so I just say include grev so I just say the name of the file in the braces I don't have to specify a file path because the graphics file path is already set so I just say the name of the file so this is what a done project would look like in reading my reading directory you would see this for anything I'm currently researching inside image has the names of the files and then all their sub items if I have images to import into a lock tech document and that's that's basically at a time going through my stuff now it's organized enough for me and also because I don't want to have directories upon directories upon directories and I don't want to have like some complex scripted system that I have to debug if something goes wrong I could easily just have everything organized just based on file name because I can easily see that this is 20/20 when I read it what it is what they're working in medieval York and then an author's last name mold so I can easily just see this structure and then it's dot PDF notes to PDF notes tech so they're all organized by name they're all going to be clumped together anyways and this is what I wanted so back to my readme so I have my directory for images I have my my bib files with all that like covered in a prior video done and it will have those three documents things are reading things I'm currently that are currently unread and then how I have my naming conventions on my files the year I read the item the name of the item the author's last name and then the extension would be whatever it is and then notes so that is currently how I have a set up I kind of spend a little bit of time today thinking about how I wanted this to be structured because it kind of wanted a more consolidated simplified and structured way of doing this without getting too complex but also having like really good-looking notes and I just decided to just use my law tech template and then have the output look you know have it look nice it looks pretty I have an abstract in there but that's really just for like saying like what my goal for this research item was my title in it table of contents because I just love how law tech prints tables of contents by the way I structured this one because I didn't take too many notes because I was really looking for pertinent things for me to connect back to my Renaissance Faire thing my act where I actually do talk about leather work in the Viking Age I wanted it to be about things that are actually pertinent to what I wanted to talk about I don't care about certain elements of the state of the finds or how they cleaned up the leather or how they had to preserve it I don't care I want to know what what did they have in the Viking Age like what were they what were the decorations like what were the tooling methods what was the materials what type of skins did they use what was common how did they diet how did they tan it how did they yeah so all that stuff I want to include in there and I didn't want to include a lot of the fluff it was a 400 page PDF so what I did is I just wrote down sections subsections and sub subsections etc for the structure of the document in the exact order of the existing table of contents so the entire table of contents of the original document is represented here but as I go through the the headings you can see like 2 to 3 these sections I don't have anything under here that's because I don't have the original document I don't have it highlighted and do anything graphical I wanted somebody to be able to like take these notes and take the document and be able to go okay I see where the heck introduction heading is underneath there you'll see my notes so they could easily see where these notes would fall on in the section of the original document and for me that's also like you know it's for me as well but or they could just easily read this and see the cliff notes of like what I pulled out that is pertinent to say putting on a leather working in the Viking Age Act at Renaissance Faire so this is like how I structured this type of document this might not be how I do things for everything but at least for this this is what I found Ruby to really work for me now for things like a journal or a research paper I might just look at that and write some general small notes and I mean it's not long enough it's not a long-form document to have like a whole table of contents like this 400 page of monstrosity so it might not look like this but I also wanted to do this because then I can easily if I need to ever use this in a consolidated reference like if I wrote a paper on Viking Age with other work for whatever reason if I ever do that if I you need to pull in these sites like citations or paraphrase or snippets of text from this document I want be able to go back find out exactly where it is so I can reference page numbers if I ever need to but it just sets me up for success later on so that's how I structured that now if it's not a long-form thing like a journal or a paper I might just take simple simple notes and I have a notes tech template file here I just copy and make a new one a lot of stuff in the preamble just to make it look pretty here's where I would put my notes really I mean that's it and I'm just using the abstracts abstract portion to just you know write what what my goal or purpose is in studying this material that I'm currently looking at now in here I asked I have my stats class textbook this is from like my stats class I took in college well not in college I took this as an on an online place but you know college credit worked worth because I have my van Wyk you set up for this and it's just it's not like a research paper it's kind of it's just a class textbook I might read this and just make vimla key notes and that would work for me especially with what my current projects are and so that's probably I'm gonna do with that but it's still here at my Reis stuff because I am researching it so anything I have to research I am putting here and it will generally follow this workflow of make a new note document keep all the naming conventions the same move it between unread reading and done so I can keep track of what I'm actually reading and taking care of at the time and I moved my environmental variable for my bib reference from documents to here because this way it just consult it's everything everything research related into one directory and I am quite happy with how it is right now who knows I might get more advanced with this later on I know that NYX casts I talked about him in my ass video his he's got a crazy note citation system and vim and Bosch that is just impressive how he got that set up at this point I'm I might look at something that complex or maybe look at what he's got in the future but I just wanted something simple enough that got out of my way and let me just spend less time tooling my system and actually doing the research I'd trying to do so that's what I'm working with so far let me know what you guys used if you have any suggestions yeah let me know Thanks