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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4277 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 14, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How do you keep track of what you've read online? How do you manage your personal research? Do you have a system? Do you have collections, and keep notes? Is this an actual problem you have?

Personally, I often read something and then struggle to find it again months later, or open something in a new tab to read later only to lose the tab. Or I might write down my thoughts but then lose the context of what I was looking at when I had them. It just feels like things here could be much better.

How do you keep track of what you've read online? How do you manage your personal research? Do you have a system? Do you have collections, and keep notes? Is this an actual problem you have?

I have a backup folder that I update and copy to a flash drive a few times a year. I've named the .txt files by intentionally adding a number at the start of the name (0 to 5) to signify the importance and make it easier to sort them. For example, "2contacts.txt" lists my acquaintances, their contact information, birthdays, etc.

The downside is that this system takes a moderate amount of effort to regularly update/trim/reorganize everything. The upside is that I basically never forget anything.

@gattsuru, if there's one person who's answer I'd like to hear it would be you. Is there a method to your trick of pulling obscure trivia on various topics, or do you just have photographic memory or something?

I don't have a photographic memory, and may have a worse memory than most people. Have tried some techniques like the memory palace, but they're very hit-or-miss for me, at least.

I've got a handful of tools set up, but they're mostly glorified record-keeping:

  • a todo list for major projects separated by scope, following the Ruby-inspired rule to break apart a scope or trim down my targets if they exceed 5-7 points. I've moved it to Nextcloud for sync purposes, but for a while I was using SVN (not recommended).

  • a (set of) TiddlyWiki for keeping high-relevance notes (cfe The New Zettelkasten as a more aspirational breakdown that I'm absolutely not anywhere near). I'm not sure TiddlyWiki is anywhere near the ideal software for this, and even in its class there are a variety of other strong tools (eg Logseq has a lot of fans, Foam if you're a VSCode masochist). (way back in the day this went on a PalmIIIc, but that was awful.)

  • and I've had downloaders akin to Gwern's approach, to try to make more readily locally-searched tools for heavily-used forums and social media (largely inspired by the broken search at RPGnet back in the 00s). It's not always the better option, but it's good for narrowing down time periods to then use other online search tools.

These aren't good tools, though, and there's a reason I've got this on my list of things I'd love to hear from someone deep into the reeds on it. A TiddlyWiki dive from site->user->subject->category->timeblock is hard to actually follow unless you're looking for something as broad as an entire field of study, and in many ways that's the simplest use case. By contrast, looking up some reference from a book I read five years ago the process is usually something like subject->book->topic, but this struggles badly given many books have important revelations away from their core subject (eg, I read an important bit about multiplexing in power plant design, does this fall under electrical engineering, or under fossil or nuclear power, or something different). Grepping the full file works where there's a rarely-used technical term, but falters when a matter is more colloquial: as an example, if I'm looking up a SCOTUS cert request on warrant requirements, which narrows things down a bit, but it was a specific case where the cop was a thief, and it probably would have just been faster to do a site:scotusblog.com search for "rare coins" to find Jessop.

The philosophy behind Notes Must Link helps, a little, but only at the largest scales. I want to think tags could help, but narrowing down to a hundred posts, many of which are only tangentially about a topic, doesn't make for fast lookup. And if you have four hundred tags, you're a) not going to use them, b) not going to find them, and c) won't be consistent in application.

((and, uh, it's pretty unpleasant to read for pleasure while also taking this depth of notes. For written fiction, I'm usually just throwing a single author->book->summary + clever quotes bit, and sometimes not even that.))

More generally, I don't have any real ability to search video, and my attempts to kitbash an audio transcription capability are pretty error-prone, and there's legal reasons you shouldn't default-record audio anyway. I kept manual notes from the IRC era and still type down major information from Discord channels, but keeping up with even a couple Discords worth of incoming information is unmanageable. Other formats -- IRL, video games, VR -- are pretty much just out of scope.

How do you keep track of what you've read online?

Readwise. Can import Kindle notes, can just right click and save a passage from any article.

But, tbh, a lot of the work has to be done at the time of reading. I basically read for the future: I speed through books but I constantly stop and highlight anything I think I might later care about and I add annotations for clarity. That way, when I come back to it, I know exactly why I noted that.

My retention isn't good but it becomes better every time I blast through all of the highlights and I can more easily find stuff I care about. If I don't care to reread then maybe I didn't need that information anyway.

How do you keep track of what you've read online? How do you manage your personal research? Do you have a system? Do you have collections, and keep notes?

Old school massive bookmark tree.

if something can be lost and is important, such an an obscure song or other content, back it up. otherwise, write down the name to refer to it later.

I have a browser history that is 443,000 pages long, going back four years. It is indispensable for re-finding things I once read. I'd say several times a week I find myself going back to my browser history for one reason or another.

To take the most recent example, I was talking to a friend and trying to recall this Motte post about GreatSchools essentially downgrading schools for having black students. So I did a browser search history for GreatSchools, noted on what date I visited it, and then manually went back to that date in my browser history to find the Motte post (reasoning that I presumably clicked the link at the same time I read the post).

There are surely more robust methods of notetaking or various browser extensions for saving pages, but, meh, I know damn well I'm never going to be diligent about manually adding things to it. But more importantly, you aren't usually sure what you're eventually going to want to re-find. So I figure it's better to have a zero-effort method, even if it's a lower-resolution wide-net kind of system.

For long form content I use a citation manager. I use Zotero specifically. I especially like the browser integration with snapshot. It helps with link-rot quite a bit. The search is not quite as powerful as web search, but tagging and folders help with content I really want to keep track of. I also like that I can keep notes with the other other searchable meta-data.

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