I am asking you to make notes about your process, not take notes. There’s a difference.
When we make notes, we are mindfully building a foundation through a process of linking. Jupyterlite is an environment where we can write analytical code and do statistical analysis, as well as make notes. The idea is that you make your observations there in text files (that use the markdown conventions for styling the text) that link to your analysis.
It’s a kind of souped-up hybrid digital lab bench/lab notebook. The key thing is that you can interlink your notes, observation, and code using square brackets [[ and ]] to create links and pathways through your thinking.
I want you to make notes in that environment that connect what you do with what you read and what you observe. This active process will have an impact on your thought and your learning:
- Connecting ideas across time and contexts
- Reducing cognitive load through external memory systems
- Enabling serendipity through unexpected link discovery
- Supporting non-linear thinking natural to research
In this post, I give you some advice on different kinds of notes you might make.
What is a reading summary note?
It’s good practice to make an overview note for the things you read so that you can find relevant information later on when you are marshalling your thoughts. If you are using a note-making application (like our modified Jupyterlite lab, or Obsidian, or Joplin, etc), these overview notes can be wikilinked to other notes, observations, or analysis, thus building up your web of knowledge.
A straight-forward approach to making these kinds of notes is courtesy the historian Chad Black. He calls it ’the Rhetorical Précis.'
The ‘Rhetorical Précis’ is a formula designed to help you move beyond simple summary to a more analytical synopsis of a work. As such, the précis, in a compact form, forces you to think about both the content and method of a piece of scholarship. This is very useful in developing an historiographical understanding of the work you are reading, of the connections between works. The formula for the précis is based on a few simple sentences:
- Sentence one gives the following information:
- name of the author, title of the work, date in parenthesis;
- an intentionally chosen active verb (argues, asserts, claims, denies, refutes, proves, disproves, explains, etc.);
- a ’that’ clause containing the major claim (thesis) of the work.
- Sentence two gives an explanation of how the author develops and supports the major claim of the work identified in the first sentence.
- Sentence three states the author’s apparent purpose, followed by an “in order to” phrase.
Formula in action:
- In Chapter 1 of One Dimensional Man (1964), Herbert Marcuse argues that […]. To build this argument, Marcuse […]. Marcuse makes this argument in order to […].
Find ways to link these notes together that are meaningful to you. You are building an active lab notebook that will help you generate new observations and make knowledge.
Experiment Note
An experiment note lays out what you’re going to try, the literature you’re drawing on, the data you’re pulling together, and your expected outcomes. It will link to the computational .ipynb file where you do the actual transformations of your data and your analysis. Your experiment note can then link to the output cells from your .ipynb file and then some of your conclusions can be sketched out in it.
Consolidation Note
This note develops and changes as you do more experiments; it recounts the purpose and outputs of a sequence of experiments. It might in fact be the outline for a longer paper, where you have a section on the literature you’re drawing on (linking to the reading notes you’ve taken), the method (where you link to your experiment notes’ methods sections), observations (where you link to the output cells in your computaional .ipynb files), and a discussion.
There are many approaches you can take; search for ‘personal knowledge management’ to see a variety of systems that people have developed. But be warned the search for the One Best Method can eat up a lot of time. Best to just make many short notes, each with one big thought, and interlink those, to begin with. If we take a larger perspective, part of what you’re doing this term is thinking through what the best approach for you might be.