(Archived) Evernote for books readings

[yakou32 0]

Hello,

 

It's quite a while since I've not used Evernote.

 

Main reason is that I really have a huge ammount of stuff to read for a PhD research, and Evernote did not seem so efficient to record bibliographical data (authors, page, titles, tags and topics...).

I heard that some kind of plugins exist for these specific needs. However, I did not find any. I may not have the right keywords on Google as I find much more books about Evernote, than taking notes about books...

 

Would you have some plugins names to share with me?

 

Thanks!

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Hello,

 

It's quite a while since I've not used Evernote.

 

Main reason is that I really have a huge ammount of stuff to read for a PhD research, and Evernote did not seem so efficient to record bibliographical data (authors, page, titles, tags and topics...).

I heard that some kind of plugins exist for these specific needs. However, I did not find any. I may not have the right keywords on Google as I find much more books about Evernote, than taking notes about books...

 

Would you have some plugins names to share with me?

 

Thanks!

I just completed my PhD. Evernote was a huge help, and I found it to be exceedingly efficient at recording everything. I am not aware of any plugins, but if you are looking for dedicated apps made for scholars, you might want to start with Papers or DevonThink.

Personally, I don't think those two apps scale up very well, and they are not well-suited to a mix of personal and professional stuff. I prefer Evernote to them. Here is how I have set stuff up.

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=367

Basically, I create one note for a reading. I have some templates that might help you get started.

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=459

Then, I link out of the reading notes to bibliographies, biographical info on authors, etc. It functions like a personal wiki.

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=488

You can put your PDFs into your account, but I prefer to textify everything for various reasons.

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=551

At the end of my PhD, I had accumulated somewhere between 10-60,000 notes. It depends on how you count these things. Do web clippings and textified journal articles count as "notes"?

I have several thousand reading notes (notes I created with my thoughts on the readings), several thousand notes connected to these (biographical, bibliographical, etc.), several thousand web clippings related to the topics, several thousand textified journal articles and so forth, several thousand with research journals, several thousand with my writing (a note per paragraph for the initial draft of writing projects), etc.

You get the point

[yakou32 0]

Thank you very much for your answer.

 

I think I'm going to follow your advice and use a similar approach by setting up some custom-made templates.

[gazumped 11,658]

I've mentioned this before,  but there's also a mind-mapping app that specialises in .. well quite a lot to do with document curation - 

 

Docear (“dog-ear”) is an academic literature suite. It integrates everything you need to search, organize and create academic literature into a single application: digital library with support for pdf documents, reference manager, note taking and with mind maps taking a central role. What’s more, Docear works seamlessly with many existing tools like Mendeley, Microsoft Word, and Foxit Reader. Docear is free and open source, based on Freeplane, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Technology and developed by scientists from around the world, among others from OvGU, and the University of California, Berkeley.

 

http://www.docear.org/

[catsknit 17]

 

You can put your PDFs into your account, but I prefer to textify everything for various reasons.

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=551

I am currently trying to put some articles in EN by scanning and then doing OCR in ABBYY FineReader, then saving as pdf into EN.  A lot of steps.  Do you know of anything like Automator that works in Windows for textifying?

thanks

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

You can put your PDFs into your account, but I prefer to textify everything for various reasons.

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=551

I am currently trying to put some articles in EN by scanning and then doing OCR in ABBYY FineReader, then saving as pdf into EN.  A lot of steps.  Do you know of anything like Automator that works in Windows for textifying?

thanks

Hi. I am afraid I don't know. A Google search turns up a few possibilities like this:

http://www.a-pdf.com/text/

What you are doing doesn't seem like a lot of steps, to me! In fact, if you use an import folder, then really all you have are two steps -- scan the dead trees, do OCR and save into the folder.

[catsknit 17]

Thanks, that looks like it will be a good one to try.  No, the reason I said a lot of steps is that a) my OCR is still learning from my articles (lots of medical jargon, abbreviations, etc) so it's taking me awhile to correct each one.  and 2) more importantly, I have a lot already scanned in as pdfs that I'd rather not have to rescan and do the OCR on one at a time.  I may be confused by all of this but it looks like you were able to have Automator do it in batches, which  would help me a lot. 

Thanks!

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Thanks, that looks like it will be a good one to try.  No, the reason I said a lot of steps is that a) my OCR is still learning from my articles (lots of medical jargon, abbreviations, etc) so it's taking me awhile to correct each one.  and 2) more importantly, I have a lot already scanned in as pdfs that I'd rather not have to rescan and do the OCR on one at a time.  I may be confused by all of this but it looks like you were able to have Automator do it in batches, which  would help me a lot. 

Thanks!

Hi. I use Adobe Acrobat Pro for OCR. It can do PDFs in batches, though I usually end up crashing the program if I do more than 400 pages or so at a time, so that is something to keep in mind. I use Automator to take the OCR'd PDFs and turn them into .txt files. I guess Automator could be used for batch OCR processing, but I haven't had the need to do that.

As for OCR accuracy, it varies from wildly inaccurate for some materials to nearly perfect. There are a lot of factors involved, but in my case, one of the problems comes with old versions of poorly printed Chinese characters combined with unconventional formatting. This really throws the software for a loop, and it wouldn't be worth it for me to go through everything and correct each character. Besides, some are extremely difficult to produce on modern keyboards, because the characters don't exist in regular font sets.

That is more technical than most people need to know, but for a general workflow, I've found scan > OCR > textify > Evernote to work well in my case. Scan > OCR > Evernote also seems fine, as long as you recognize some of the limitations and potential problems.

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=169

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=127

I am unclear as to why you would ever want to rescan material. Unless you have poor scan quality that you want to improve, that shouldn't be necessary.

[catsknit 17]

It's probably my limited understanding of these documents but I thought if you scanned something as a "flat" pdf it would not be able to be OCR'd at a later date, it's just an image.  So the older documents are being stored as images, and to textify them (I thought) would require rescanning before OCR.  Not right?