Naked Science Forum

General Science => General Science => Topic started by: satrah on 22/03/2014 00:23:28

Title: What's the best way to organise information?
Post by: satrah on 22/03/2014 00:23:28

Hello all

I am a big follower of Dr karl and i here him say a lot that he has a 24 some meg file on a particular subject but he seems to have a lot of these single files on a subject. I would like to know some tips on organizing information on a wide variety of subjects, do i link them to the type of ~ology or by subject or give up together and just uses Wikipedia. 

I try to get them into folders but they tend to get very messy and unorganized, with a lot of double ups.
 

Title: Re: Organising information
Post by: evan_au on 22/03/2014 08:58:09

I found that Google Desktop was very good at indexing and retrieving information on my computer. This tool is no longer supported by Google, but last time I looked, you could still choose to download it.
With Windows 7, some similar indexing is done by the operating system, speeding up searches.

But you need to read and collect a lot of information, so that you know roughly what the answer is, which gives you the keywords by which you can search your data files.

Google on the web is very good, and Google is quite good at locating relevant information in Wikipedia. I am sure other search engines could also help you find information on the web.

Title: Re: What's the best way to organise information?
Post by: satrah on 04/04/2014 04:52:07

Thank for your reply

 Sound good to me.

Was thinking the other day that may be a personal wiki page on the net will be the way to go for this project and integrate it with file from internet and personal file on PC (dropBOX).

Getting organised is always the hardest step for me but once i get the rest is all down hill.  :D

Title: Re: What's the best way to organise information?
Post by: dlorde on 05/04/2014 18:44:03

I use theBrain software (http://www.thebrain.com/products/thebrain/) (was Personal Brain) to organise all the files, links, notes, sites, etc., in my life. Similar to a mind-map, it visually arranges elements in parent-child hierarchies with cross-links for associations, and is very quick to search even thousands of elements ('thoughts'). You build it up, adding new 'thoughts' as you want, and it's easy to re-arrange what links to what. The full version is expensive, but there's a free version that does everything I need. I have it sitting as a little icon on the side of my desktop which expands into a searchable map window when I click on it, and goes back to an icon when I click elsewhere. I can click on a 'thought' and it will open a web site in the browser, or a open document or folder, or show a page of notes, etc. It's great if that's the way your mind works. Worth a try.

Title: Re: What's the best way to organise information?
Post by: CliffordK on 05/04/2014 18:59:42

It all depends on how much effort you wish to put into "organizing".

I effectively keep my files together in subdirectories or folders on my computer.  Descriptive file names help a lot, and one can search for elements that you would put into a file name.

You could also create a database in MS Access of OpenOffice/LibreOffice Database.  Designed right, you could put in a lot of different search fields and information about the files.  However, the setup & maintenance time would be high.

Alternatively you could dump summaries into a spreadsheet (Excel or OpenOffice/LibreOffice Calc).  It has a bit less of a formal record type organization than you would get with the database, but it is easy to setup and update, and is searchable and sortable.  And if you are rigorous about your fields in the spreadsheet, it can be imported into your favorite database later.