Doing What Works- Academia Edition

Making notecards for research papers seems like a pretty accepted thing. When they taught us how to do research papers in high school, they made us do them (and handwritten, too!) When my friend, a history major, was writing papers for college, he made them. His were handwritten. Quite a few of my friends make them too.

As soon as I wasn't required to anymore, I stopped making physical note cards. It's not because I don't think they're a good idea. I think having note cards is great. The problem is making them. My handwriting is messy enough that handwritten note cards don't actually do me much good, and writing starts to hurt fairly quickly so I'm not inclined to make cards, especially when they won't help much due to the messy handwriting issue.

Instead, I've been typing my notes. This is useful because it's hard to lose a digital copy of my notes. It's also useful because I can read things I typed later. It's easier than handwriting, because typing doesn't make my hands start to hurt. It lets me post my notes publicly, which I do in the hopes that they are useful to someone else. (I've got friends who do academic stuff, and if my notes about a source help them decide if reading it is worth it or not, or if having my notes lets them spend less time going through the source once they have it, this is great! I like it when academics post things publicly and it makes other people's lives easier.)

Because technology exists and can do cool stuff, and because I know printed note card size flash cards exist, I recently looked around for ways to print directly onto index cards. Lo and behold, it can be done! Apparently, as long as you make your paper size right in your document and in the print step, most printers can print to index cards, either 3"x5" or 4"x6".

Now I can get the benefits of both digital notes and legible notecards! It's a bit of a process, but way faster than trying to read my handwriting.

1. Take notes on my laptop, typed, regular letter paper sized document.
   
2. Save as "Notes" for the source.
   
3. Save again, as "Note cards" for the source.
   
4. Change the page size to 4"x6" (big index cards) and the margins to 0.5"
   
5. Copy the citation for the source to my clipboard.
   
6. After each note that I want a note card for, paste the citation and then insert a page break. On my copy of Open Office, ctrl+enter does a page break. (I don't need a physical card for "Also read this source the author cited")
   
7. Load up the index cards in the printer and print!
   
8. Sort the cards by project they relate to. If a card relates to multiple projects, I can print multiple copies of that page so that a card for it goes in every project it relates to.
   

I do have a decent bit of overlap between projects, too. My projects (in varying levels of activity) are below, and purple lines connect projects that currently have at least one shared note card.

Image description: Project titles in boxes connected by lines representing shared note cards between the projects. The listen projects, left to right and then top to bottom, are 

1. "Neurodivergent Philosophy of Science," 
2. "Rethinking Engineering Design and Disability," 
3. "Cognitive Interpreting Application," 
4. "Theory of Mind Inside Out,"
5.  "Disability Studies for Engineers Course Creation," 
6. "Cognitively Accessible Language (Write so the folks you write about can understand)", 
7. "Erasure of Queer Autistic People," 
8. "Queer Because Neurodivergent is STILL QUEER."

Using the numbers as shorthand for the projects, the following pairs are connected:

1 and 2, 1 and 4, 1 and 5, 2 and 3, 2 and 5, 3 and 6, 4 and 6, 4 and 7, 4 and 8, 5 and 6, 7 and 8.