With the increasing ubiquity of digital archives has come the expectation that we must use them with rapid advances in search technology has come the requirement that our research be more comprehensive than ever before. So too, therefore, are expectations. This shows up in the far right Inspectors pane of the three-pane display.In an age of information overload and technological advance, our research methods are rapidly changing. See Also & Classify is where you interact with DEVONthink’s AI. Step 2 Build Groups Using See Also & Classify Once you have a document in a group you can use DEVONthink’s poweful AI to see if there are other documents that might be a good fit for that group.
Hmm.DEVONthink is a powerful data storage and research app for Mac, iPhone, and iPad thats a natural complement to OmniFocus. A take home message for me is how Arno does not use DTPO for tasks such as outlining and note taking. Consolidating this untidy sprawl has become a problem in itself, one to which scholars usually apply themselves only incidentally in the actual task of research.Building a Research Database with DEVONthink Pro Office GradHacker About GradHacker Mission Statement People Write for Us Commenting More like this.For now, a few people sharing information on how they use DEVONthink Pro Office: 1) Arno Wouters, a postdoctoral research in philosophy talks about how he uses DevonThink and other research tools: Arno's Tech Tools. We work with a scruffy assortment of research formats: typed notes, PDFs and archive photographs alongside microfilm printouts, photocopies, and a scrawl of illegible notes from that one archive on your research trip that wouldn't let you bring in your laptop.
What I found most helpful when getting started was to look at as many examples of how others had used DevonThink that I could find. There are thus as many database configurations as there are people in the world: each one a unique reflection of the brain which produced it. DevonThink was designed to be a solution to the problem of managing the data we collect, and its ultimate solution is to 'go paperless': every scrap of your research can be transformed into bytes and deposited into the database, to be retrieved with mere keystrokes.The beauty (and terror) of DevonThink is that opening a new database is like staring into a slate grey abyss: DevonThink allows you to fashion pretty much any folder structure you like, to impose any order you wish upon your data universe. It's extraordinarily permissive: DevonThink will take text files, Word documents, PDFs, JPGs, PNGs, web bookmarks, RSS feeds and more. It's an incredibly smart, flexibly structured, fully searchable database, a one-stop container into which one can deposit all manner of research material.
With archives, I usually replicate the filing structure of the archive itself, as this helps with citation later on. "British Library", "The National Archives, UK"), and within that, one group per source I consulted from that repository. I allocate one group for each physical repository I consulted (e.g. In my "Archives" group, my substructures usually mimic those of the archives I visited. An expanded version of this essay is available on my blog (the URL for which is appended below).DevonThink's flexible filing structure is one of its biggest attractions for me: it allows you to create any root file structure you wish, beginning with the most basic unit, a "group".The bulk of material in my PhD database is contained in two groups: primary material ("Archives") and secondary material ("Library").
I find this to be particularly useful for historical work, since we collect data sequentially over time, but must, in writing up, make connections between more recent acquisitions and data which may have been acquired more than a year ago. DevonThink can thus, over time, "intuit" relationships between documents in your database: based on the frequency of rare words within a single file, it attempts to tell you what other documents in your database are likely to be relevant. Every word in the database is indexed and weighted according to frequency of appearance. And because all files are named according to the same format, with the date first, I can sort them alphabetically and get a list of documents in ascending chronological order over the course of a single year.Perhaps the most unique feature of DevonThink is textual concordance. This file was automatically included in my 1948 smart group because it matches the specified conditional. So for example, in Figure 2, the file highlighted green is a letter to the British colonial office dated.
Having used both Pro and Pro Office, I would say that the OCR recognition alone is worth the purchase, though this endorsement comes with the following weighty caveat: As someone who works also with Chinese, Indonesian and Malay material, I've found DevonThink to be inadequate for dealing with non-English and non-Romanized material. The Pro Office version of DevonThink therefore has fantastic OCR-recognition: it can literally "read" PDFs—even photographs of typescript, which is particularly useful for historians—and parse them as text.OCR functionality is limited to Pro Office, the most expensive version of DevonThink. The key to this, of course, is that all your data must be searchable text.
I'm just less sure that it's as good to think with as we may hope, and I'm particularly unconvinced that historians will be able to fully achieve the paperless dream anytime soon.Rachel Leow completed her PhD in History at Cambridge University in 2011 and is presently Prize Fellow in Economics, History and Politics at Harvard University. I love my database as an unparalleled system for containing, managing and organizing data for that alone, it has changed my research life, and may well change yours. All this is quite apart from the fact that historians are still welded to non-digitized archives and materials, and quite apart from the monolingual imperatives of DevonThink. There is a certain physicality to writing by hand rather than typing, to rereading rather than searching, which sinks data into one's body and makes it available for connection, synthesis and analysis in a way which even an intelligent database can still only at best mimic.
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