In recently submitting an article for publication, and in writing my paper for presentation in October, I am reminded of the importance of organization, and the ways in which I am clumsily trying to accomplish it.
The article I submitted was missing various parts in the footnotes, as was noted by the editor. Several were lacking the volume number of the journal. I have been using Paperpile as my bibliographic program, but I knew this was not the program’s fault. Being sloppy, I had only entered the volume number for items where I had held an actual volume in my hand, issues bound together into a book. The ones obtained from Hathi and Internet Archive and elsewhere, being separate pieces, did not usually include the volume number. Luckily, these were the easy ones to find again.
Clearly, this is an organization problem. As noted when I set up my system for this project, Paperpile is extraordinarily useful for storing books and articles, and for tagging and organizing them. Of the system I originally set up, I have ditched the wiki, using Google Docs (linked to each other) instead. It is functioning, but barely. I still can’t find things or figure out exactly where/how to write. I’m not sure where it’s best to store images, nor how to retrieve them.
It was nice to discover I am absolutely not alone, and that historians have always had issues with organizing notes and evidence. I enjoyed Keith Thomas’ diary from 2010, which points out several methods that have been used, including a 17th century version of sticky notes. I do always carry a notebook (my commonplace book), but am never sure how to create proper entries for it; my current notebook has a page for each day I’m in the UK, with handy things like where I’m staying and which museums are open late. But after those date pages I just dog-eared a page, and beyond that dog ear is a mish-mash of pages of notes. I’ll likely not be able to find these notes again. I can’t imagine tracking a double-note system like the one Francesco Sacchini developed – taking notes in notebook and again on slips of paper, so they can be reorganized. But I’d like to read him – is his Ratione Libros Cum Profectu Legendi Libellus available in English?
I also get impatient with handwriting notes when I know I could type them faster, but don’t have the means (that flat thing they have on my mobile phone is NOT a keyboard, no matter what they claim). Electronic annotation of articles, a feature of Paperpile, didn’t work for me. And when I take clear photos of documents in a library, many times Optical Character Recognition programs can’t translate them into usable text. Then I can’t copy a phrase easily to comment on, or use in my work. Google Keep looks nice, but it’s hard to find things. It would be better to store articles and images (Paperpile isn’t good at the latter) somehow within a program wherein I can also write. Instead I’m going back and forth between tabs.
I crash my computer with so many tabs open (well, OK, watching the Dodgers while I work doesn’t help), and I keep getting the strong sense that I don’t know where my notes are. My best results have been achieved by downloading articles, putting them in Paperpile, printing out pages, marking them up, and putting them in file folders. Hardly ideal for the 21st century, and useless for traveling.
Going back a few hundred years I find that the difficulties are quite the same, but the indexing systems were better. I had never heard of cards with holes that, if you put a knitting needle through, shakes out the ones you’re looking for (the notched edge card system). While I don’t want to go back to 4×6 notecards, I do see the advantage.
