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With a lot of notes and lists in Google Keep, I always wonder when Google will kill it like Reader. So, I'm really behind projects like this focusing on opennes

With a lot of notes and lists in Google Keep, I always wonder when Google will kill it like Reader. So, I'm really behind projects like this focusing on openness and durability. I hope it's a success! I do academic research as a grad student and it's very reassuring to know that if my office doesn't burn down or get ransacked, that my pen-and-paper research notebooks will be there for reference to see what I did on a past project. It was an exceptionally cool experience when visiting the NRAO[1] Archives[2] to pick up and read 70+ year old research notebooks from pioneering astronomers. It seems like it would take a great deal of vigilance to make digital notes endure for that long. However, digital notes are useful, especially for brain dumping something quickly, so I've settled on vimwiki[3] in a git repository. They're just markdown utf-8 textfiles in a folder hierarchy, and I figure vim and vimscript extensions are pretty darn future proof. It's also useful when traveling and being given a guest Linux work station to use that it doesn't require admin privileges to get working: just git clone the vimwiki repo into ~/.vim and clone the notes repo. [1] https://www.nrao.edu https://www.nrao.edu [2] https://www.nrao.edu/archives/ https://www.nrao.edu/archives/ [3] https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki

gglitch 10y ago
My principle, maybe my only, problem with paper is appending to notes I've already closed by opening new notes after them. I realize there are methods like the bullet journal's that address this, but they've felt clumsy to me. Did you notice any particularly effective nonlinear note taking style being used by these astronomers?
- autocorr 10y ago
  You know, you would think for something as basic as writing down what you're doing there would be an optimized way passed down like some sort of tribal knowledge. But from having asked around, the note taking process spans the entire spectrum from old school big research notebooks, collated three ring binders, instances of mediawiki, evernote, to just a bunch of .txt files scattered throughout their filesystem. However Evernote is probably the most common--being able to easily copy-paste plots and images seems to ease a big pain point. For paper notes, I know exactly what you're talking about. I think such a non-linear problem can be solved with different note taking methods as "short, medium, and long-term storage". I find my research notebook useful as a dated "what am I doing right now", free-form input useful for equations and diagrams, and short term to-do lists (which are more useful for outlining the steps needed to actually get something done). However, it's not very easy to lookup info by topic and it's time consuming to write out detailed explanations in long-hand. I haven't had much luck with the bullet journal system or similar because it's just hard to keep those indices up to date. At this point I find it most useful to type up the "cooked" knowledge into vimwiki at various points. These semi-fully formed digital notes can then be used as the building blocks for the "long-term storage" of more durable works like journal articles or papers.
watersb 10y ago
(this made me smile; I worked at NRAO for ten years.)

gglitch 10y ago

My principle, maybe my only, problem with paper is appending to notes I've already closed by opening new notes after them. I realize there are methods like the bullet journal's that address this, but they've felt clumsy to me. Did you notice any particularly effective nonlinear note taking style being used by these astronomers?

autocorr 10y ago
You know, you would think for something as basic as writing down what you're doing there would be an optimized way passed down like some sort of tribal knowledge. But from having asked around, the note taking process spans the entire spectrum from old school big research notebooks, collated three ring binders, instances of mediawiki, evernote, to just a bunch of .txt files scattered throughout their filesystem. However Evernote is probably the most common--being able to easily copy-paste plots and images seems to ease a big pain point. For paper notes, I know exactly what you're talking about. I think such a non-linear problem can be solved with different note taking methods as "short, medium, and long-term storage". I find my research notebook useful as a dated "what am I doing right now", free-form input useful for equations and diagrams, and short term to-do lists (which are more useful for outlining the steps needed to actually get something done). However, it's not very easy to lookup info by topic and it's time consuming to write out detailed explanations in long-hand. I haven't had much luck with the bullet journal system or similar because it's just hard to keep those indices up to date. At this point I find it most useful to type up the "cooked" knowledge into vimwiki at various points. These semi-fully formed digital notes can then be used as the building blocks for the "long-term storage" of more durable works like journal articles or papers.

watersb 10y ago

(this made me smile; I worked at NRAO for ten years.)