I recently resumed working on a book that I had to lay aside for almost three years.
The re-start process includes going through all my research notes. Now it’s time to impose some structure on those notes. I find that the corkboard view is most helpful.
Are there any recommended best practices for organizing my notes into folders and subfolders that I can drill down into on the cork board?
I use note cards to store quotes and citations from resources I intend to quote in the book itself.
Any suggestion to help me organize a fairly extensive body of research notes would be helpful.
Don’t be afraid to split note documents into smaller pieces. (Use keywords or other metadata to keep track of sources.)
Other than that, it really depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. Do you expect to organize the book chronologically? Thematically? Probably you will want to organize the notes in a way that reflects that structure.
Maybe if you want to search for them “by eye”. But if you want to search for them using specific criteria, I would rely more on metadata. Keywords and labels are often sufficient. Keywords for the “structure” and labels for the eye (visual indicator).
This is sometimes a better system of folders and subfolders because you don’t have to move the documents around.
I don’t know what you mean by “a fairly extensive body of research notes”. Hopefully not more than Scrivener can digest. Otherwise you will notice that and you still have the option of creating multiple projects.
Agree with FTO. Metadata is the way the go to help you find what you want. You can have multiple keywords for a document. So you could have a keyword for “Bob” and one for “Sally” and one for New York City. Searching by keywords separated by a comma could yield only scenes containing both Bob and Sally in New York City. You have keywords for plotting, romance, foreshadowing etc. You can even save a search collection based on the keywords. So could have a collection of “Bob” scenes. Now when open collection use CTRL + A to select all and click the corkboard and can then see the cards there to look at. Custom Metadata gives you endless ways to tag files. Labels can be visual cues and you can use custom icons (any png file can become a scrivener icon. I like various shape colors as easy to see) to supply visual info.
Yes, I’m very careful to make sure my Projects are backed up!
The structure of the book is finally taking shape in my mind. I began my research four years ago with a preliminary argument and structure in mind. But recently the better structure presented itself.
Now I’m trying to organize years’ worth of research notes into a structure that will enable me to organize around the book’s structure yet make it easy to find and recall “that quote” that’s buried deep in the database.
Now that I think about it, that seems to be my problem–how to track down a note or a quote in the Project but I’m not quite sure where I filed it… The problem of too much research?
Thanks for this tip. I’ve been wondering how I can best utilize Keywords. I need to go back into the documentation to bone up on that.
The “fairly extensive body of research notes” encompasses five years of research into historical theology (with Greek and Latin citing the Church Fathers up through 1975), two major doctrines of Christian theology), and extensive exegetical work in the original texts of the Old and New Testaments.
I’m using EndNote to keep track of the works I either cite or consult. But Scrivener handles the actual notes with aplomb.
One more thing: Scrivener can search for any combination of words or parts of words in a text (a note). So if you know roughly what you are looking for, you will find it.
My point is: don’t spend too much time on (unnecessary) organization that only distracts you from the actual work.
Start writing. In the course of your work, you can (incidentally) add key words, labels to your documents (or not).
