Taking notes

Miller Prosser, March 2022

Integrative Note Taking in OCHRE

If you're like most researchers, you have implemented various note taking strategies for excerpting and commenting on passages from secondary literature. A previous generation of scholars dutifully recorded notes on 3" x 5" cards indexed and stored in file cabinets. With the advent of relational databases, it seemed prudent to move to a digital recording system where bibliography is recorded in one table and notes in a second table. The more dedicated researcher may have pushed normalization of databases tables to a greater degree. Note cards could now be searched and references entered only once. Various NoSQL or graph approaches to the problem have been developed to accommodate the inherently entangled nature of note taking.

In OCHRE, we leverage the highly atomized and integrated data model to push note taking even further.

Combining internal document resources, bibliography, and OCHRE items, taking reading notes in an OCHRE project is a more powerful and integrative approach to note taking.

Prerequisites:

• Bibliography items, either native OCHRE bibliography items or access to Zotero from within OCHRE.

• A resource hierarchy for saving and organizing your notes.

• Taxonomic variables and values for classifying your notes.

Two scenarios for note taking:

• Scenario #1 — taking notes while reading a book or an article.

• Scenario #2 — adding notes from multiple sources while curating data in OCHRE.

Anatomy of a Note Card (see image below)

• Note cards are stored as internal document in the Resource category in OCHRE.

• They can be stored in hierarchies just like external resources.

• Note cards are be attributed to a creator and timestamped.

• The Internal document field is a free-form text field for typing or pasting string content. For note cards, this is a good place to record a quoted passage from a secondary source. If valuable, this pane supports multilingual text. OCHRE provides integrated access to the Google Translate API to translate between languages. So, if your article is in French, you can record an exerpt on a French tab in the Internal document pane, then use Google Translate to quickly add an English or other version of the excerpt.

• The standard series of properties, links, notes, events, bibliography, and other categories apply to internal documents.

  • Properties record metadata about the note. These are fully customizable in the project taxonomy. Properties make it possible to find all notes that share a common metadata variable and/or value. For example, perhaps you wish to describe concepts or themes such as "Climate" or "Faunal taxonomy." Again, these values are customizable by project.

  • Over time, a project may develop property predefinitions to quickly add a template of properties.

  • The Links tab can be used to add Period links or Resource links such as images, PDFs, or web links.

  • The Events tab provides the range of workflow features and other event-related properties. See Events

• The Notes and Bibliography metadata are central to note taking.

  • The Bibliography field records a link to a bibliography item, either from an internal OCHRE bibliography item or from a Zotero bibliography item. See Zotero Integration

  • The Bibliography link provides a field for specific citation location such as page number, plate, figure, etc.

  • The Notes tab provide unlimited notes, attributed to observer and timestamped. This is an appropriate place to record observations about or responses to the excerpted passage.

Scenario #1 Adding Notes from Secondary Literature

While reading through a book or article, once simply keeps OCHRE up in the background, then adds notes as desired.

Process:

• Navigate to the appropriate resource hierarchy in OCHRE.

• Insert a new Resource, choose Internal document.

• Enter a title for the note card.

• Add yourself as the creator of the note by clicking the person icon on the Creator(s) tab.

• Type or paste excerpted text into the internal document field.

• Add properties as needed.

• Using the Link manager choose a bibliogrpahy item to add. OCHRE will ask for citation details such as page numbers.

• Add notes, events and any other details.

The Outcome:

• This process makes these note cards available for querying by property, string matching of excerpts and notes, and lookup by bibliography link.

• Each note card is also useful as a database item that can be linked to other items in the project. For example, one may choose to link a note card to a location, person, period, or other database item referenced in the note. This can be done when the note card is created or many years later when new database items are created.

Scenario #2 (see below)

In some cases, you may wish to add notes to database items while you are creating or curating those items. So, you're not necessarily reading through an entire book or article; but you may wish to pull a book off your shelf and add some notes to a specific database item. Maybe you are creating a lexicon of terms and need to add some information from a printed dictionary. Or maybe you are curating a catalog of museum objects and need to add references about the decoration or material of the object. In any case, OCHRE provides a mechanism for adding note cards on the fly quickly and easily.

Process:

• View the item in question. In the image below, we view a Spatial Unit that represents a sector of the Royal Palace at Ugarit. Let's assume we stumbled across a reference to this area and wish to add a note card directly to the location in OCHRE.

• Go to the Links tab.

• In the Other links toolbar, click the "Insert New Notecard" button.

• OCHRE will pop up a new internal document. Enter details as in Scenario #1.

• Save and close. OCHRE saves the newly created internal document in the Resources Inbox. You can organize the new note card as needed by dragging and dropping to a new Resources hierarchy.

Querying Note Cards

Note cards can be searched by name using the Linked items pane. In the example below, we search for all Resources with the word Climate in the title.

In some cases, it may be helpful to use a more nuanced and powerful search. Note cards can be searched using Queries. In the example below (left), we restrict our query to a specific hierarchy, then search for a specific term across all fields.

Uses of Zotero bibliography can be found quickly using the Find links button in the Linked items pane. In the example below (right) we choose a reference, then click Find links to identify where this citation has been used throughout the project.