getting text from book into a notetaking app

Posted by dan7000
Sep 16, 2013 at 02:45 AM

Dr Andus wrote:
dan7000 wrote:
>>When I started doing this it was with an iPod Touch. The camera was
>>pretty bad on those though. It works much better with a tablet or
>>iPhone 4.
> >Was that a 4th gen. or 5th gen. iPod Touch? Just wondering if 5th gen.
>is any better.
>

I’m not sure. It was the first version of the iPod Touch but I’m not sure what they numbered it. I got it new in 2008. My iPhone 3 also took terrible pictures though. I have a 4s now and there is a huge difference in quality. My iPad Mini takes even better pictures of pages, and my Samsung Galaxy Tab also is very good.

>
>I guess I should have made it clear that when I dictate a passage in
>Dragon, I immediately put it into a note in Freeplane, where I organise
>my notes into a hierarchical outline (mind map), effectively
>reverse-outlining the argument of the book I’m reading (this is for
>heavy-going academic books, where seeing the overall outline of the
>argument—and where the quotes are coming from—helps comprehension).
> >So my focus is on immediate processing of the notes (rather than taking
>a lot of notes first and then processing them), which would be disrupted
>if I had to introduce an additonal step of uploading photos, OCR-ing
>them, and copying and pasting text into Freeplane.
>

Slightly OT but I’ve often wondered if an “analyze as you research” method would be better than my usual workflow. I usually do a bunch of research where I just dump tons of relevant quotes with citations into Evernote, then after I’ve got all that in EN and, to an extent, in my brain, I create an outline (currently in Workflowy). Then I start drafting in Word, pulling cites from Evernote, and I quickly see where the holes in my research are. So I go back to do more research, again just dumping everything relevant into EN - then back to Workflowy to refine the outline, then back to word. It’s an iterative cycle like that until I have a first draft and after that I pretty much stick to word even if I need to fill in a little extra research.
I’ve considered whether I’d be better doing the outlining at the same time as the research, but I feel like it would slow me down and maybe confine my research. But the flip side of confining the research is that it would be more targeted - i.e., you probably focus your research on each point in the outline sequentially so you don’t have holes in your research when you start drafting like I do. But do you find that doing all that analysis while researching slows down the research phase?