> When I read papers, I often write short notes to myself about > them, as I imagine most people do. I picked up a strange habit because of a high school bio

> When I read papers, I often write short notes to myself about > them, as I imagine most people do. I picked up a strange habit because of a high school biology teacher.. the vast majority of homework that he assigned was inevitably content creation based on source material. As a consequence, when I read papers now, I compulsively: * re-draw diagrams in different styles * make tables for data that wasn't presented as a table * categorize which claims are associated with which citations * make lists, lots of lists! You can never have enough lists. Gunkel said so: http://ideonomy.mit.edu/gunkel.html http://ideonomy.mit.edu/gunkel.html * change the way information is displayed * demonstrate equations, or at least attempt to work through them * make up summaries of content * paste direct excerpts.. which over time deteriorate in usefulness. So far, every "annotation solution" I have tried just impedes my work, so I always resort to using some HTTP file server to host my files, or write HTML when I want to add markup to my notes.