Note-taking and -organizing for historians

Dear History Graduate Students:
I plan to devote two-hours of my History 223A (Research Seminar in Modern Europe) to the art of note-taking and note-organizing. I decided to open this session to interested graduate students. The workshop will be held at 4-6, Monday, January 23, in HSSB 4041.

Roger Eardly-Pryor will demonstrate how to take notes in archives.
I will show the David Kertzer method I learned from my colleague at Bellagio.
Peter Alagona will demonstrate the Alagona method.

The idea of this workshop is prompted by my learning the Kertzer method. When I wrote my dissertation many, many years ago, there was no computer, and I had to rely on 3 x 5 note cards to take notes and organize my dissertation. Since then with the new computer technology and availability of various programs, I have experimented various methods, but all these methods have been unsuccessful, partly all these programs are too sophisticated and hence too difficult and cumbersome to learn. Thus, I managed to write a few books without any system, but I have always wanted to develop a system that is simple but efficient. At Bellagio I bumped into the Kertzer method, and I am now slowly converting all notes into this system.

Since then I have talked with several graduate students, and learned that very few research seminars here offer note-taking techniques. Graduate students here are pretty much on their own, and through trial and errors, they have to come up with their own system. They suggested that our grad students will greatly benefit from a workshop on note-taking and note-organizing, especially at the early stage of graduate career. Hence, I have decided to open up the two-hour session of my seminar as a workshop.

If you have already a great note-taking system that works for you, then you don’t need to come to this workshop. But if you are wondering how to take notes, how to organize and digitize your notes, how to take notes from secondary, primary, and archival sources in such a way to get access to these notes efficiently, and how to incorporate these notes into a seminar paper and a dissertation, this workshop might be of help.

Please let me know if you are interested to attend the workshop.

Toshi Hasegawa

hm 1/12/12