Organising your thoughts
It can help clarify your thinking enormously if you have a trusted system to keep, organise and connect your notes.
A new stable of lightweight apps designed to help researchers connect their thoughts together have begun to emerge. The idea behind their popularity is that knowledge tends to work associatively rather than hierachically. Most or all of them use Markdown syntax for writing.
-
Notion: Notion bills itself as an all in one workspace. It allows you to make any number of pages, tables, links, databases and link them all together in just about any way imaginable. It’s free for education (sign in with Google using Griffith ID). Notion has just released an API making it more interoperable with other application.
-
Roam Research: Roam Research is popular with academics. It is a paid service and web-only at this stage.
-
Obsidian: Obsidian is free and open-source and is developing rapidly.
-
Microsoft OneNote: While OneNote can technically do linked notes, it is not specifically built for it.
Our recommendation: Notion
Notion is free for educational users. It is the easiest to get started with and the most visually attractive (if you like that sort of thing). There is a large and active community sharing Notion dashboards and designs, and many YouTube accounts describing how they use Notion to manage their study and life.
Runner up: Obsidian
Obsidian is free and open source, and has many plug-ins that extend its capability. Its documents are plain Markdown (.md) text files, meaning it’s extremely easy to migrate to and from the app to any other.
There are many other note-taking apps to suit every fancy.
- Airtable - online relational database
- Evernote - a venerable classic
- Rocketbook is a new tool introduced by a previous attendee at this workshop. It captures your written notes in a paper book and converts it to digital text.
- DEVONThink (Mac only): A unified document, note, file and thought storage, management and linking database.
A mind map is a fantasic way to see and develop your ideas. You can mind maps to your connected notes app (above) to get the best of both worlds.
- ⭐️ Diagrams.net Fully free, with web and desktop versions. A wide range of templates. Integrates with OneDrive and Google Drive.
- MindMeister - mind mapping tool. connect through O365 at Griffith
- MindNode is a popular Mac and iOS option.
- Scapple
- MindJet
Our recommendation: Diagrams.net
Free and open-source, fully-featured, highly integrated. What’s not to like?
Now that you’re completely organised, it’s time to look at some tools for capturing data.