Getting Organized: Notes

I find that part of being a successful academic is the skill with which you organize your thoughts, your work and your time. Much of this comes simply from experience. However, you can easily learn how to better structure your reading and note-taking. Here I supply my own methods, but you can just as well develop your own, or improve on mine. The most important thing is to get organized!

Working in academia, you need to keep yourself well-informed about your subject. This goes for students, who need to digest a ton of new knowledge fast, and for experts, who need to keep themselves up to date on the research in their field. Both are faced with an immense amount of reading material. In order to keep track of the texts I read and to make their points more available to me as time passes and the memory of them fades, I use a system of categorized note-taking.

Firstly, I would advise anyone looking to get better organized to download the Firefox add-on Zotero. It comes in a free version with limited space which should suffice for most students. It is an immensely powerful tool for structuring your material, arranging it into groups, making your own tags and for quickly and automatically constructing a bibliography. No more late nights typing Harvard citations before a hand-in!

Secondly, whenever I read a text, I open a word file on it with the name and year of the author. Example:

Wilken, Lisanne. 2012. “Anthropological Studies of European Identity Construction.” Pp. 123–44 in A Companion to the Anthropology of Europe, edited by Ullrich Kockel, Máiréad Nic Craith, and Jonas Frykman. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 

I save this as "Wilken 2012.docx" (or whatever word processing program you're using). Whenever I find an interesting quote, I copy it to the word document. With most modern texts, this is just a matter of copy-paste. If you have a physical copy of the text in question, you're going to have to type.

Then, I write my analytical thoughts on the text in red font and any references to other texts or thoughts outside the text in blue. I recommend changing your shortcut keys in word so that you can easier switch between font colors. The document will look somewhat like this:

Wilken references Johan Fornäs’ distinction between different kinds of EU symbols: “The first type includes symbols that have a purely discursive or symbolic application – the flag, the anthem, Europe Day, and the motto, for instance. These symbols signify the EU in an abstract way and are not (yet) embedded in people ’ s everyday life. The other type of symbol has a double function, as both a symbolic expression of identity and a material tool of integration; this type of symbol includes the passport, which is a personal document of belonging that literally distinguishes “ us ” from “ them.”” (Wilken 2012:131). Cf. Billig 1995 and his banal nationalism.

The Euro is also an integrative symbol: “Fornäs has for instance argued that the design of the euro notes and coins creates a narrative about unity and diversity, which is reinforced by the way that money is circulated. The fact that nationally distinct euros can be used in any and all of the countries in Euroland represents a form of intercultural interaction beyond economics.” (Ibid.:131)

With reference to Sassatelli’s work on the European City of Culture program (Sassatelli 2002), Wilken concludes that as representatives of local communities also aid in constructing the notions of the European culture promoted with the initiative, the outcomes of EU cultural politics cannot be reduced to the intentions of the policies themselves. (Ibid.:132)

Wilken explains that there has been an official attempt to give the EU an identity, its ‘Other’ being Europe’s own past: “A European past of war, conflict, division, repression, and discrimination exemplified with references to colonialism, racism, warfare, holocaust, communism, totalitarianism, and xenophobia was juxtaposed on an EUropean present, which was defined with reference to values such as peace, tolerance, multiculturalism, antiracism, anti-antisemitism, anti-islamophobia, and respect for minorities. This positioned “ Europe of the past ” and in particular “ Europe of the nation-state ” as the EU’ s most significant Other.” (Ibid.:133)

On page 134 is a nice list of anthropologists who have worked with European identity formation. There is also a section on methodological difficulties. However, “It is also generally accepted that the anthropological research methods which were originally developed for data collection in small - scale societies, do in fact produce valuable insights when applied to larger - scale societies.” (Ibid.:134)

When finished, I mark the text in Zotero with the tag "read" and a rating for how helpful or interesting I thought it was: Gold star, Silver star etc. You can personalize these tags to better fit your way of working, but the general idea is to put the text in a relevant category.

This might take some initial work, but the returns are immense. Amassing a library of these "notes on texts" will enable you to quickly re-acquaint yourself with past texts, identify relevant parts and incorporate quotes or points to whatever you're currently working on. It provides you with a powerful overview, as each "note on text" is vastly condensed compared to the original text. This allows you to much better structure your notes, your work and your time.