Devonthink for Historical Research, part II

 

Using devonthink for historical research: Constructing the Database

DevonThink Pro Office (DTPO) has become my research database of choice. In the Mac world, particularly with the advent of Spotlight which allows for full text searching of everything on your hard drive, one may ask why bother with a database program. I find, however, that Spotlight searches become quickly ponderous. With a certain amount of discipline, it is possible to refine Spotlight through the use of keyword tags. To do this, you would tag each file with a number of relevant keywords attached to a symbol (@ or * or &) so that later, when searching for related notes keyword searches are possible. The addition of the symbol (ie, @Quito) would limit the returns to files that have been appropriately tagged rather than any file that includes the word within the text. The comment field is accessed through the more-info option whenever a file is highlighted in the finder, as any Mac user would be familiar with. There are also other apps you can download to help with the tagging process. 

I’m not that disciplined. 

Before getting more specifically into DTPO, let me note that there are a number of other excellent note-taking and research database programs out there that might be better suited to the way you think, like to take notes, and organize your data. Circus Ponies Notebook is well regarded. Mind-mapping applications like NovaMind…  MacJournaler or other journaling apps can be adapted for note taking… There’s Yojimbo, Voodoo Pad, Soho Notes, Omnioutliner, the more expensive Tinderbox for crazy hypertext note taking… The list goes on and on, and  even something like Zotero which is primarily intended as a reference manager can be used for some types of note taking. I need something more powerful than a simple note taking tool, though. And this is where DTPO really excels.

What I like about DTPO is its ability to organize information in a hierarchical notetree while also maintaining the flexibility to organize and access the information in freer form. Some people have no need for hierarchy, the but information anarchism doesn’t work for me.  I like to visualize my sources in a way that reproduces their organization in the archive, for the primary stuff, as well as the thematic and narrative points they will later support. 

 

This is the database that supports my current research, though it is not complete. Much of the info that worked into the late colonial part of the project hasn’t made it into DTPO at this point, and may never! 

As you can see, the tree contains root folders titled Inbox, Incoming (redundant/feeling my way around), Tasks, Notes (short notes not related to specific sources, but related to the project), Article Manuscripts, Book Project, Theory/Gender/Sexuality, Padrones (for extensive jail census), My Writings (dissertation chapters, conference papers, manuscript chapters, etc.) and a few other largely unused bits.

Book Project is divided chronologically into the Bourbon Period and the Independence/National Period, which are further subdivided by primary and secondary sources both printed and manuscript. Whenever possible, I will embed the actual source in the database as well. With relatively low-cost/high-volume storage available, it would really be possible to store the photos of each of my case files with the notes as well. Right now, however, this database is on my Macbook- so not enough storage there!

I further subdivide based on the physical location of documentary sources– AGI, by section or AGN by section, then by box, then by date or other organizing tag within the box. I now try to do all or most of my notetaking directly into devonthink, in the form of rtf files inside the note tree.  In Screenshot 2 you can the transcription and notes taken for a series of letters titled Memoria de la Revolución de Quito en cinco cartas escritas a un amigo, octubre 1809.  I like to have DTPO in 3-pane mode, so as to see the tree, the contents of an individual folder, and a note-taking space.  I take most of my notes now directly in that third pane. When taking a note, I enter the title on the title pane, and then replicate that title at the top of the note, which becomes important for export down the road. (Yes, I export my notes still, both for redundancy purposes and because I haven’t yet made the full jump to paperless workflow). Notes seem to work best when limited to no more than about 1000 words. Shorter actually works better when later using DTPO’s search and classification functions.

 

It is at this point that Bookends comes into play. Though Bookends as a bibliographic manager plays pretty well with DTPO, Scrivener, Mellel, Pages, and Word- the apps I’m most likely to use– it is not the only option. Other popular options include Sente, EndNote, and Zotero (players big and small). 

For any given source, I have an entry in Bookends, which produces a unique source number for the entry. I do two things in linking Bookends to DTPO — first, I will almost always add a hot link to the source root folder in DTPO to the entry in Bookends. More importantly, though, for rearranging information later, I insert in at the end of each note a short citation from Bookends that is generated by the program and indicates the author, year, and database #.  I also add the relevant page #s for the note. It looks something like this: {Andrade, 1934, #5906@419-420}. When inserted into the text of a manuscript, Bookends can recognize this notation and replace it with a properly formatted citation. For me, though, the notation acts as an anchor for when the notes become disconnected from their position in the tree.

I don’t keyword tag each entry or folder. This is possible in the current version of devonthink through a work around that isn’t exactly a keywording function. You just use the comment field for an entry, and best practice would be to to reproduce the system I described above for spotlight.  I don’t bother to do this because devonthink has the best, most powerful search functions of any application I’ve ever seen, allowing for fuzzy word searches, phrase searching, and much more sophisticated searches of blocks of text for linguistically similar other blocks of text within your database. More on that in another entry.

For now, back to constructing the database.

 

DTPO offers the option to link any note file to any other note file in the database, or to link any term to another note. Thus, you can grow, over time, a wiki or glossary of important terms, concepts, or people that links to central entries on those things. Because the data doesn’t have to be hierarchically anchored, you can set up a separate folder dedicated to these explanatory notes. Likewise, DTPO offers the option to replicate or duplicate files and store them in multiple positions within the database.  This enhances the organizational flexibility of the program, enabling a combination of storage options.  Once a wiki is set up on a name or term or concept, it seems DTPO automatically generates a link to that file, which is convenient.

For secondary sources, especially pdf files imported from sites like jstor or from your own scanner, DPO offers a couple of nice features. For files that don’t come with a pre-embeded text layer, DTPO will OCR (optical character recognition) pdfs to make them text searchable. These pdfs can then be read in preview or skim or adobe and marked up with notes, highlighters, underlines, and the like. Blocks of selected text can be dragged into DTPO. The next version of the program is supposed to integrate with Skim, which will make this type of notetaking even more powerful.  Otherwise, I treat note files in secondary folders the same as I do in primary folders, linked to Bookends. 

As far as it goes, I’m one of those people who prefers to quote in full a source in my notes rather than to summarize. Whenever I take a note that is wholly my own, or that is commentary on a source quote, I try to change the font color just to be clear. This paranoia goes back to a particularly adamant professor in undergrad at Appalachian State University who taught the Civil War and had a reputation for sitting in the library, looking up citations in term papers. I hear he would also do this with job candidate’s dissertations with any referenced source he could get his hands on.

So, there is the process I engage in for building the database. Next time I will look at using DTPO’s search, classification, and analysis tools to manipulate the data, as well as note export to Scrivener in the move towards writing.

One last note– Devon Technologies is currently beta testing a long overdue update to its devonthink application.  DevonThink 2.0 will add, I hear, significant new integration with Apple’s quicklook to support more file types, the option to work on two databases simultaneously, new user-friendly GI, tagging, and more. So it may be that even as I write this series of posts, I’m already an anachronism.

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