Organizing lots of thought snippets

Posted by Dr Andus
Jan 26, 2015 at 09:52 PM

Hugh wrote:
>summarised as “First, develop your outline; second, drag carefully
>selected pieces of evidence/research into your outline at the
>appropriate nodes; third, write your essay/paper/article around the
>pieces of evidence/research”

These steps seem more relevant for the final stage of writing up. However, I think the OP’s question concerns the processes of organisation, analysis and synthesis that precede this final stage. How to “carefully select pieces of evidence/research”? This is what hierarchical outliners are not equipped to do (indeed, they are entirely the wrong tool for the job, at least for large data sets).

Hence the need for a Zettelkasten type tool that allows one to gather stuff (and resist the temptation to start sticking it into a fixed position within a hierarchy too soon), rearrange in many different ways, discover new relationships between data (based on some initial tagging), annotate them further, and then only at the very end start doing the outlining for a piece of writing (well, OK, interim writing can also be helpful, but it’s not outline-driven).