How do we not only take notes, but also take note of the ways that the digital transforms the research process?

At the tail-end of our first meeting, Justin Joyce brought up the question of how he might apply the digital to his collection of notecards that attempt to codify whether the good and bad guys indeed wore white or black hats in classic Western films.

At first, we pondered how computational power might not be very adept at addressing the difficult questions of judging the good guys from the bad (not that people are that skilled at this task all the time either!). This is, of course, one of the key questions about thinking through algorithmic analysis. But then we began to talk about more than just how the digital is not some kind of positivistic fantasy of attaining definitive analysis. We also broached the question of wether new modes of presenting research in digital form might provide fresh possibilities for the ways that argument look, feel, and what they ultimately mean. Could Justin do something interesting merely by scanning his original notecards and presenting his findings in the digital medium in ways that might produce new perspectives on his research question?

This part of our conversation came back to mind for me when I recently browsed a few blog posts by Rachel Leow (thanks to Josh Honn for the link), Matthew Kirshenbaum, Sasha Hoffman, and Thomas Riley. These posts all relate efforts to use both analog and digital modes of note taking in their research. Tools used: DevonThink, Scrivener, Zotero, Evernote, among others. I share these musings with graduate students, librarians, and tech folks among us as potentially useful explorations of what we might call “the question of the digital note.” It strikes me that this is not only a practical issue of managing research, but also a question of how the structure of the research process in the digital medium might inspire new ideas, approaches, questions—in short the research process, transferred into the digital in more consciously developed ways, might lead to new kinds of findings.