Getting Organized

Mosaic glass inlay from Ptolemaic-Roman Egypt, depicting a mask of a maenad, the dancing female worshipers of Dionysus, wearing a wreath of ivy. Image and description from Eduardo García-Molina via Twitter; object itself is in the Miho Museum, Japan.

As I’ve said before, it may help to think of your research for this class in this way:

Find a topic that interests you
Find what others think about that topic
Find primary evidence
Develop an informed opinion about that evidence (and what others say about it)
Express your ideas and relevant material supporting those ideas in a way others expert in the topic an understand

Generally speaking they happen in about this order, but it really isn’t that rigid. Once you start doing reading secondary literature you keep doing it throughout the research and writing process. Your topic may inform your final thesis (opinion) but that might also completely change as you find primary evidence through your readings and other matters. It’s messy. Or, at least its messy if its any good!

This exercise and research advice is about finding a system that works to manage the mess without impeding your creative flow. You are going to read and think lots of ideas that MAY be relevant down the road. You are going to find lots of pits and pieces of evidence from lots of different sources that you might want to stitch into your final paper. You need have a system that accomplishes the following goals:

is easy enough that you’ll stick with it
helps you find where you came across something without too much hassle
enables you to distinguish between your interpretation and someone else’s interpretation
let’s you distinguish between primary evidence and secondary literature
let’s your rearrange your material so different items ‘speak’ to one another so that you can explore patterns and connections

Any system that meets this criteria can work. I have used a wide variety of systems over my career since HS (really I learned some of this in 11th grade American history researching a paper on Vietnam) right up to today. I still change around my systems from time to time depending on the project and the material.

All I expect from you is a commitment to try one of these systems, evidence that you at least started one, and a final reflection on whether you would use the system again in future or not.

If you’re already using a different system and it works for you, send me an email explaining it.

Before attempting any of these approaches please read about the UNEVEN U. This will help you think about what types of material might be good to work into your system to help with future writing. OR, you could watch a youtube clip on the idea instead. You could consider coding your system with the number representing how the material might fit into your future writing. Not required, just an idea.

Index Card Approach

If you love analogue and physical books and stationary…

If you are easily overwhelmed or distracted while working on a computer or a phone…

If you like systems with a proven track record…

…this technique might be for you!

The idea behind this approach is that just one tiny idea goes on a card and that the cards can be dealt out in any order. The small size of the card reminds you to limit the information you put on a card. Lined cards and the two sided character of cards can help you separate and systematize references to where you got the information and what you think about the idea or information. Some people take it a step further use color coding to differentiate card types: either buying colored card or using a highlighters to mark regular white cards. If you’re on a budget, this approach can be done with cut up regular paper: 4-8 cards can be easily cut from a regular sized letter paper. The drawback to this is the stiffness helps with shuffling and re arranging and organizing cards, but this is slight.

I used this system for the whole of my master’s thesis (25,000 words! – 4 colors of card: 1 for each ancient author and 1 for secondary literature) and my doctoral dissertation (144,000 words – one color of card, but with post it notes used like book flags to help me organize along with rubber bands and binder clips; color system broke down with so much material). I still have all these cards, but, thanks to the pandemic, they are trapped in my office on campus, so I cannot share with you. However, I was recently coaching a NYU PhD student who felt their own writing has stalled a bit. They found this so useful they sent me a picture a few weeks after our session:

How do you get started? After you get your materials, when you start reading something you first create a bibliography card.

Include enough info that YOU can decode any abbreviations so you can type your bibliography up from the card alone if need be. Also include a note about how you found it so you can find it again if need be. Notice the color coded ID in the top right corner. This will make it easy to sort out these cards if your deck gets dropped or otherwise messed up.

This is the front of a card. It should just have one quote on it or a summary of an idea. Notice the P! highlighted green to make clear this card has primary evidence on it. Only use abbreviations you can easily decode. Notice top right is a very short summary of theme/content. This will help with later sorting. Not it mentions where you found it under quote. Also notice use of color and lines to mark up interesting features of text. This lets you quickly remember why something was of interest to you earlier.

This is the back of the same card. It has a bullet point list of both facts and interpretation both your own and that of the secondary source. It also has (possible) action items for (later) follow up at the bottom and this has a color code again for easy sorting.

Here’s a card with a Secondary Literature quote. Notice the blue coded S! for easy sorting and again the very short summary of topic upper right hand corner. A key reference to primary evidence in the quote has been highlighted in Green as that is the color code and similarly a reference to secondary literature that you want to look up has been highlight in the TO DO color. Underlining is used to mark key idea.

This is the back of the same card. It records just enough of the title of McCarthy’s book found in the bibliography of Clark’s book to let you go find it and a note about why it might be relevant. The bullet points are your own words and can help with incorporation later in the writing process. You could just create a bibliography card for McCarthy straightaway, but this might stop you from continuing to read Clark and find all the goodness it has related to your project!

The color coding system and summaries and categories can be all yours. I can also help brainstorm what might be logical for your project. There are very few don’t other than don’t go too overboard in your purchase of ‘supplies’, some are helpful, too many or too gimmicky can be a distraction. I don’t like the cards that are spiral bound that you rip off the binding, but this might be personal. I also recommend avoiding cards larger than 3×5 as more space will only tempt you to put too much on a card–less is more. I like lined other than unlined, again you may feel different. Also before you buy anything ask friends and family if they have spare cards; this stuff doesn’t go bad and tends to hang around in drawers. Remember you can also use a glue stick and cut and paste pictures and quotes on to your cards too. OR you can draw little pictures to remind yourself.

Try it! It might change your research and writing forever! Or perhaps your whole life, as it did mine! (Thanks Ms. Cammack!)

A MS Word “Headings” Strategy

If you’re all about texts and computers…

If you like lists and copying and pasting…

If you want to be able to include links…

… this strategy might be for you!

This technique can probably be mimicked in google docs or other word processing programs. If you are expert in one of those and want to make up an alternate set of instructions mimicking these here, I’d be grateful and throw a couple of extra (credit) points your way. You are however entitled to a free Office 365 account and software through the university so everyone registered for this class can use this approach, if they wish.

Open a new document and immediately save it with a transparent name in a place you can find easily.

2. Click File –> Options –>Save. Then ensure that your auto recovery and font embedding is set as shown. This is just good advice for all word docs and will save potential tears later.

3. Now on the Home menu notice the option for ‘Styles’. You’re going to create and use headings to organize stuff you find. You can start with headings like “Primary Evidence” and “Secondary Literature” but it might be better to not to as thematic headings will help you start to categorize and interpret your evidence.

As you apply styles to your headings (just click the text you want to be a certain style and then click that style up on the tool bar), this will create a Navigation outline of your document based on these headings. To open click VIEW and select Navigation panel in the Show section of the tool bar. This let’s you jump around as you want to add new information to your document.

4. The flexibility in this mode of thinking comes in large part from your own willingness to rearrange and retitle but as you add materials and wish to shift categories around, MS Office makes this easy. From the view menu select Outline from the Views section of the tool bar.

5. The outline tools let you move whole sections up and down and change what level a section is in the hierarchy. This let’s you structure all the material you’ve found in ways that are meaningful to how you interpret that material.

I use this approach most commonly when I ‘m working on single ancient author. Say reading all of Cicero’s letters looking for information on intellectual activity or Dionysius’ Roman Antiquities looking for why and how he talks about the present day in which he is writing. It’s particularly bad for organizing visual evidence. In the above example I’ve just pasted URLs in as text but you can also highlight a word or phrase and then right click and select link from the drop down menu and create a cleaner link that way.

Other Computer-Based Strategies

These are described in less detail but are no less useful!

PowerPoint or Google Slides as Virtual Note Cards

This imitates to a degree the first strategy described above. It is useful if you are doing much of your research online and are comfortable use screenshot/screen grab/snipping tool. The idea is simple. Grab and image or the text you wish to save. Grab the link to where you got it. Add a few words to the ‘slide’ to make sure you can find it again. Rinse, repeat.

I recommend using the “Title Only” Layout to create a mostly neutral work space but one with big obvious headers that help you categorize. You can also change the background color of individual slides under the “Design Menu” if you want to color code.

When you are taking notes you’ll want the normal view (no. 2 in this screen grab below). BUT when you want to sort your ideas and create thematic connections this slide sorter view will let you easily shuffle and rearrange. OR print the deck of slides two or four slides per page, cut them out and try shuffling on your floor or kitchen table or other large work space.

I used this technique when I first started researching my coin book. It was a way of keeping lots of visual observations and scholarship together. I rarely use it any more.

Blogging

As my coin book progressed I needed a more flexible system of note taking on texts and images. I also found myself using my phone a great deal to take pictures of relevant texts and images that I came across in print books or museums. I created a WordPress blog. For the first four years it was 100% anonymous. I can access it from my computer or my phone. It’s easy to upload screen grabs and take notes and quotes and link to materials. I love it. At first I was diligent about tags and categories, but now I just trust that if the post has sufficient keywords I’ll find it again when I need the information. It is the no. 1 way I now take notes and organize my thoughts. I also create links from new posts to older posts all on a theme or topic. One could use this type of system on a completely private or password protected blog. They are free to create and develop skills that will be useful again and again: 65% of all websites are designed using WordPress. That said it might be too much for a single project.

Other Apps and Tools

Some people love Zotero! It is a downloadable program with a plug in that lets you easily save and collect everything you find as you go along.

Other people love Trello! It is web-based and has board-list-card organization structure and allows you to easily rearrange elements. It starts by assuming you want to collaborate and need to do lists to do so. But the organization system is also great for visualizing all the elements in your research project. The free product is more than powerful enough.

Is there another tool you know off? Let me know!