Useful Tools

Learn all the districts of Afghanistan with Anki!

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A friend was asking about using Anki to learn to recognise the districts of Afghanistan so I made her a deck that provides tests in the following way;

On the front of the card the question is presented along with a computer-generated audio pronunciation of the district name:

Then if you know it, you'll answer Badakhshan and then you'll click/tap through to the next screen to see if you got it right. You'll see this:

 
 

Then you can mark whether you got it right or not. There are around 400 districts to learn, so if you learn 13-15 new cards each day you'll finish the whole lot in a month.

Why learn all the districts of Afghanistan? Sometimes you'll hear someone talking about a particular place or part of the country, and without knowing which province they're talking about you might not understand the context or the conversation. Plus, a little bit of geography never hurt anyone.

Give it a try. And let me know if you manage to complete the deck. You can download the full Anki file here. Enjoy!

Upcoming Maniac Week

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I hereby commit to doing a maniac week. This is inspired by Nick Winter and the good people at Beeminder, namely Bethany Soule and Daniel Reeves. The idea is as follows (borrowing heavily from a format over here):

  • I will begin at 6am on Sunday December 6.
  • I will continue until 6pm on Saturday December 13th.
  • I will not be checking my email at all during the week. I will also be turning off and/or disabling all chat programmes and my phone.
  • I will not use any social media websites or check RSS news. (This block will be handled by the StayFocused plugin and RescueTime’s Get Focused mode.
  • I will ensure I am in bed for 7 hours every night. This will be tracked via Fitbit.
  • I am allowed 3.5 hours every day for things which aren’t work (showers, preparing meals, eating, rest, meditation and walks outdoors). This will be tracked using TagTime using the tag “notwork”.
  • The remaining time will be for my work. This will be tracked using TagTime and RescueTime, and my main focus during this week will be my PhD dissertation.
  • As with others’ maniac weeks, I’ll be recording the whole week using time-lapse photography, though I’ll see how much hassle it is to assemble a video after the week is finished. Also, part of my work will involve me away from the computer, writing and outlining things by hand, and anything involving interview transcripts etc will obviously have to be blurred out or blacked out. Thus, I’m not committing to posting a video, but I will publish a post-maniac-week blogpost during the week that follows.
  • I reserve the right to tweak these rules (by editing this post) up until the evening of December 5. After that point it’s time to work, and I cannot change the rules any more.

No, I am not crazy. Yes, you can do one too.

Four Colours

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A few years ago, I read a book that changed the way I took notes. That book was “How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think” by Lion Kimbro. Thanks to my podcast, Sources and Methods, I had the chance to chat with Lion a few weeks ago. The episode will be out in November but I wanted to share one of the ideas that I’ve found most useful. He wrote about it in his book and we discussed it again on the podcast.

It involves taking notes with a four-colour pen. I’m talking about pen-and-paper here, not digital notes, though I suppose it might work there too with some tweaking. You use a different colour to ascribe different meanings to your notes. Thus, quoting from his book:

RED: Error, Warning, Correction
BLUE: Structure, Diagram, Picture, Links, Keys (in key-value pairs)
GREEN: Meta, Definition, Naming, Brief Annotation, Glyphs
BLACK: Main Content [p. 26]

Most notes will thus be in Black, but other things can stand out by sticking to the system outlined in the quote. It takes a bit of getting used to, including sticking up reminders on walls showing the colour scheme, but after a week or two it’s instinctual and really helps when revisiting notes at a later date.

Lion shares lots of other note-taking tips in our podcast, which I’ll post here when it’s out.

A short practical tip: ever since reading Lion’s book, I’ve been using a Bic four-colour biro which are quite easy to find in most stationery stores. Lion mentioned a different type which I’ve now been using for a week or two and have had a really good experience so far. It’s the Zebra Sarasa4 model (pictured above). If you want to get into taking notes using four-coloured pens, I’d really recommend it.

Ecolinguism and the ethics of learning new languages

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I was interviewed by Tammy Bjelland of the Business of Language podcast a few weeks ago, and the episode recently went live. Readers of this blog will know that I write about the study of language with some regularity – see the archives for some previous posts – but I don’t talk about it a great deal on my own podcast nor is it really the focus of my work. So it was nice to have a chance to talk through my background in learning languages and the challenges of learning languages with few materials available for self-study. There isn’t enough written about this.

It was also gratifying to find a forum to discuss Richard Benton’s ideas about ecolinguism. He wrote a blogpost summarising some of his ideas here:

I am an ecolinguist because I want my work to preserve the complexity of our world’s language and culture ecosystem. How do you create a strong community made up of hardened, poor refugees and rich, privileged natives? The privileged must work hard to create new connections. In middle school, the band geek or math nerd can’t simply decide to enter the “cool crowd.” Only those with strong social capital can invite in those on the outside.
The strength of our communities depends on the decisions of the privileged and the powerful. When insiders opt to forgo their comfort to commune with those who go without, they unite communities who would be isolated. When a well-educated privileged professional chooses to learn a language, for example, he forgoes his advantage in communicating in way where he feels most comfortable. The white Minnesotan, speaking elementary, broken Somali, puts the outsider, the refugee, in the position of power. Struggling to learn this difficult language allows new connections to grow.

The choices we make as to which language to learn next have a broader impact beyond our own lives. For the full discussion, visit Tammy’s website to listen to the full episode or subscribe via your preferred podcast client.

UPDATE: I now offer one-on-one language coaching. Read more about what it involves and what kinds of problems it's best suited to addressing.

Arabic Language Update: I did it! (Almost)

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My Beeminder accountability graph showing how I reached my goal for a study challenge in June

My Beeminder accountability graph showing how I reached my goal for a study challenge in June

 

Just a short post as I'm off away on an intensive language course for most of the next three months. This is the programme run by Middlebury College, but held in Oakland, California (USA) at Mills College. I was extremely lucky to win a Kathryn Davis Fellowship which covers the costs of the course and food and accommodation while I'm there. I have a BA degree in Arabic and Farsi from London's School of Oriental and African Studies, but 10 years in Afghanistan spent writing books and studying Dari and Pashto meant that my Arabic has atrophied considerably. I thought it was time to resurrect those old skills, in part as a way of deepening my understanding of some of the religious aspects of the Afghan Taliban and in part -- let's be honest here -- as a way of covering my bases prior to Afghanistan completely falling off the map a few months from now.

I'll be writing a much longer post on how to get a high-beginner-to-mid-intermediate level out of the well-known "intermediate language plateau" after the course finishes, specifically focusing on what resources are available to Arabic-language students who have good basic skills but want to go beyond that to more advanced materials. (Read these three posts for more on getting out of language plateaus in general terms.)

The Middlebury course caters to various levels of language ability, and since I didn't want to waste the opportunity just revising things I had already learnt at university, I had to do a good deal of preparatory work these past few months. I started getting serious about this preparation in February. This involved over 75 hours of spoken/conversation practice (and some grammar work) with a number of different native Arabic speakers over Skype (lessons made possible through iTalki.com), as well as a lot of reading and listening. In June, as you can see on the Beeminder graph displayed above, I challenged myself to get 100 hours of exposure to the Arabic language over a period of 30 days; this included some iTalki lessons, but was also a lot of listening to Arabic-language podcasts, time spent writing on lang-8 and lots of time spent doing so-called "extensive reading" (much more to follow on that in August/September). I managed 99.5 hours, in total, just short of the total required to successfully complete the challenge I'd set myself, but enough to really make my language proficiency come along in leaps and bounds.

An additional note to those who would like to get in touch with me during this period: as part of the Middlebury course, they expect participants to take a language pledge where you only speak the language of study (i.e. Arabic for me) for the duration of the period of study. Read more here. For non-Arabic speakers, if you want to get in touch with me, please visit Google Translate and translate your message into Arabic there before copying the full text and pasting that into the email. It's not perfect, but it allows me to continue to stay connected with the world without violating the language pledge. If I reply, I'll be doing that in Arabic, too, so you'll have to copy the text back into Google Translate to get a sense of what I replied.

I'll be away on the course until the end of August, and will thus ignore all non-essential email until then. If you write to me in English, I will also ignore your email until September. Thank you.

UPDATE: I now offer one-on-one language coaching. Read more about what it involves and what kinds of problems it's best suited to addressing.

How I use Goodreads to pick what I read

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So far this year, I have read 35 books. I'm trying something new for 2015 so I thought I'd write up the outline in case someone else finds it useful. As I wrote at the end of last year, I'll be reading 150 books over the course of 2015. That's fifty books more than I read in 2014. The point of it is to expose myself to lots of different ideas, different styles, different perspectives. I've found that 150 probably isn't an impossible amount to be reading (less than three a week) and I really relish brushing up against interesting authors and ideas.

I've used Goodreads as a way of tracking what I read for a long time now. I'm lucky enough to have an interesting group of 'friends' who also use it (more or less regularly) so there's usually a decent amount of new or niche books that I discover that way. I also use it as a way of noting down the books I want to read in the future. (Incidentally, I've never really had a problem in finding something new to read. The list of books I want to read will always be larger than the time I have to read them. That's just life.)

Goodreads offers a 'list' function whereby you can not only state that you 'want to read' a book, but where you can categorise things to your heart's content. Each year I set up a list ("2015toread" and so on) so I can see which books I think I'm more motivated to read that year. I'll usually take 5 or 10 minutes each weak checking over the list to make sure the things I added to the list are actually things I still want to read (versus things I added in the heat of a moment, after reading a particularly persuasive review, for example, but which I probably don't need to spend my time on).

Previously, I was generally following my gut with what I wanted to read next. Unfortunately, this often meant I went with the easiest option, or the path of least resistance. Long books (weighty histories, or more abstruse theoretical texts) would be passed up for the latest *it* novel or someone's entirely forgettable memoir about their time in Afghanistan that I'll feel obliged to read.

This year I've been trying a different approach. Goodreads allows you to sort lists by various bits of metadata attached to each book (author name, date added etc) but you can also sort by "average rating". This is the average rating given to a particular book by the entire Goodreads user base (20+ million users). You can see how this pans out in my current set of 'up next' books:

 
 

This "average rating" isn't in any way a guarantee of anything resembling quality. It's not that hard for authors to game the system, and books with few reviews (common for niche subjects like Afghanistan or Islam) have either really high or low ratings. But I'm finding this approach brings me to read far more books outside my path-of-least-resistance choices and often brings me into contact with some real gems.

Needless to say, this method of discovery is only a little better than putting all the names in a hat and picking one at random, but I am still finding some benefit. It does mess with my desire to read fewer male authors (you'll note in the picture above that only book number seven is by a woman; the rest are men) but everything in life is a tradeoff of some sort, I suppose.

Let me know if you find some use to this or if you have any other ways you pick what books to read next.

Note-Taking Jujitsu, Or How I Make Sense Of What I Read

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Note-taking is a problem. It's an interesting problem, but still a problem. Many people have switched over from paper books to digital copies. I am certainly one of the early adopters in this trend, having wrangled Graeme Smith and his sister into facilitating a first iteration of Amazon's Kindle to be delivered to my house in Kandahar.

My colleague Felix Kuehn and I used Kindle versions of books heavily in our research for An Enemy We Created. Using those references in footnotes was difficult at the time: the format was so new that established footnoting styles (APA/Chicago etc) hadn’t developed the standards for referencing kindle documents. All this was made harder by the fact that Kindle copies of books added a whole new problem into the mix by abandoning page numbers for ‘Kindle location numbers’. This changed a few years later, and current users probably won’t have this problem, but if you go look at the footnotes for An Enemy We Created, you’ll still find that many, if not most, of the references are to Kindle locations and not page numbers. In fact, I think our book was probably the first serious history work to rely so extensively on digital Kindle references in the footnotes; I remember having discussions with our publisher about it.

 
 

All this isn’t to say paper copies don't have their uses. But some books just aren't available in digital format. I'll get into the workaround for that later. The best way to make this less of a problem is to gently nudge publishers to issue their books on a kindle format.1 But I am already getting off track.

All this seemed to come to a head this past week, where a podcast I hosted together with Matt Trevithick took up the topic of notes and note-taking. Mark Bernstein, our guest on the show, wrote a really excellent book on the topic some years ago entitled The Tinderbox Way. I’d strongly recommend you read if you’re involved in knowledge work in any way. Here’s a short excerpt defining the importance and use patterns for notes:

“Notes play three distinct roles in our daily work:

•Notes are records, reminding us of ideas and observations that we might otherwise forget.

•Shared notes are a medium, an efficient communication channel between colleagues and collaborators.

•Notes are a process for clarifying thinking and for refining inchoate ideas.

Understanding often emerges gradually from the accumulation of factual detail and from our growing comprehension of the relationships among isolated details. Only after examining the data, laying it out and handling it, can we feel comfortable in reaching complex decisions.”2

Later in the week, Maria Popova (of Brainpickings fame) was on Tim Ferriss’ podcast to talk about her website, her reading and her workflow. Both Tim and Maria expressed frustration over the lack of tools for people wanting to download and interact with their Kindle clippings:

“I highlight in the kindle app on the iPad, and then Amazon has this function that you can basically see your kindle notes on the desktop on your computer. I go to those, I copy them from that page, and I paste them into an Evernote file to have all my notes on a specific book in one place. But sometimes I will also take a screengrab of a kindle page with my highlighted passage, and then email that screengrab into my Evernote email, because Evernote has, as you know, Optical Character Recognition, so when I search within it, it’s also going to search the text in that image. I don’t have to wait till I’ve finished the book.

The formatting is kind of shitty in the kindle notes on the desktop(…) if you copy them, they paste into Evernote with this really weird formatting. (…) It’s awful. If you want to fix it you have to do it manually within Evernote. (…) There is no viable solution that I know.”3

She then goes on to some more detailed points of how this doesn’t work, and Tim commiserates, suggesting that maybe they should hire some people to fix this problem. But the good thing is that there are solutions. The problems Maria and Tim bemoan are things that every other Kindle user has had to deal with since day one, so thankfully there are a number of workarounds that simplify the process of reading, annotating and sifting within one’s notes of a book or document.4

So notes are important, we get that. But how do we use them to their utmost? How do we even gather them together and store them? How do we use them for our writing, for our thinking? These are all important questions which I don’t feel have been properly answered, and where those answers have been given, they’re buried or hidden somewhere out on the internet.

I want this post to get into the weeds about how to get your materials off a Kindle device, how to store it usefully on a Mac (my apologies, PC/Linux users), and how to repurpose those notes to be creative, to write, and to think.

This post has three parts:

  1. Storage
  2. Clipping & Splitting
  3. Discovery & Meaning

It will by necessity be an overview of some useful tools and options for researchers, but if you leave comments I can probably expand on individual points/sections in follow-up posts if needed.

1. Storage

This is a problem that wasn’t explicitly raised in the things that motivated this post, but it’s something I get asked frequently. Maria and Tim both seem to be avid Evernote users, and I know many others also use this, but there are other options. It’s worth starting here because the tools will determine what you can do with your notes.

I’ve offered advice to other Mac users on what software to use for research projects that require a certain deftness in handling large quantities of sometimes disparate materials. The same applies to people who are just trying to keep track of the things they read, trying to draw together connections, and to derive meaning from it all. I’ll get into the meaning-creation in the final section, but for the moment, let me briefly describe our four options for file/note storage as I see it.5

  1. Finder/PathFinder. This is the lowest-tech option. Basically, once you split your files up (see section two) you store them in folders and refer to them that way. I don’t find this option very attractive or useful, because it’s like a filing cabinet. Your ability to discover connections and to remember what’s in those folders is pretty limited. I don’t recommend this at all, but from conversations with other researchers and writers, it seems this is the default option.
  2. Evernote. I include this here because it’s part of a workflow that we’ll cover later on. Evernote is great for all the reasons you can read about on their site. It syncs across all your mobile and desktop devices, it OCRs images so you can search for text captured inside photos you upload into your library of notes.
  3. DevonThink. This is my default ‘bucket’ for information, documents and notes. You can read up on the many (MANY) things that DevonThink Pro Office or DTPO (the version you should get, if you’re getting this software) does. Not only does DTPO store your documents, but it allows you to access that information in a number of extremely useful formats. There is a mobile app, too, though it could do with a bit more work. The most interesting feature of DTPO is its search and discovery functionality (using some magic sauce algorithms). They don’t make as much of this on their website as they used to, but I’d strongly recommend you check out these two articles (one, and two) by Steve Berlin Johnson which explain a little of the wonderful things DevonThink can do for your notes. As with the next recommendation, it’s not cheap. But powerful doesn’t always come cheap. It’s a solid investment if you spend the time getting to know this piece of software.
  4. Tinderbox. I discussed this at some length on the Sources & Methods podcast with Mark Bernstein, so I’d recommend you listen to that as your first port of call. Tinderbox is not an everything-bucket in the way that Evernote and DevonThink are, and I use it slightly differently, but it’s a great place to actually do the work of thinking, organising and writing once you have something (i.e. a project of some sort) for which you want to use all your notes. I’ll explain more about this in section three.

I’d recommend getting to know the different bits of software to get a sense of what they can do. DevonThink has a handy section of their website where you can see how people use it in their work lives. Tinderbox has something similar, with some case studies of usage.

For DevonThink, it’s generally good to keep your ‘buckets’/databases of files separated by topic. I have a mix of these kinds of databases (50 in total): some are country-specific, some are project-specific (i.e. to contain the research that goes into a book or a long report), and some are topic-specific (i.e. I have one for clippings and notes relating to Mathematics, one for things relating to Cardiology etc). I’d also recommend you give Steve Berlin Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From a read, particularly chapter 4.

Given the learning curve with some aspects of the workflow that follows, you might want to consider introducing these pieces of software one-by-one, or as needed. That way you’re using only what you understand and can implement things without being too overwhelmed by the novelty of the systems. It took me years (almost a decade) to implement and iterate the systems described below, and I’m still not finished modifying as the tools change.

2. Clipping & Splitting

This section is all about getting materials off mobile devices and onto your computer where you can put them into some sort of overarching database.

Accessing Your Amazon Kindle Clippings

First let’s sort out how best to get notes from a kindle onto your Mac. Don’t use Amazon’s website. It’s going to create all sorts of problems for you in terms of formatting.

First thing’s first: sync your kindle to the cloud. Just turn on the wifi/3G and select the “Sync” option. This will ensure all your highlights are backed up to the cloud.

Then plug your Kindle into your computer via USB. Then go into the “Documents” folder, and search for a file called “My Clippings.txt”. If you’ve been using your kindle for a while, it’s probably going to be quite large. Nevertheless, copy that file to your desktop. Feel free to eject your Kindle from your laptop now. We won’t be needing it any more.

 

An example of what you might see when you open your "My Clippings.txt" file

 

If you open the txt file that is now saved to your desktop, you’ll find all your clippings and annotations preserved in a useful plaintext format. This may solve your problems straightaway, in which case, congratulations: you now have all your annotations in a useful format that you can use however you wish.

If you want to take it to the next level, though, you’ll want to split this file up. At the moment, you have a very large plaintext file which contains all your notes. You’re likely to have notes from a wide variety of topics and books in here, so it doesn’t make sense for you to keep them all in a single location. The ideal solution is for you to have a single file for every clipping, a single file for every annotation.6

This is where Split-ter.scpt comes in. I’m afraid I don’t know who to credit for this wonderful piece of code. I downloaded it somewhere on the internet some years back and can’t seem to find a link to the author either in the code or elsewhere online. (Whoever you are, thank you!)

This script works with another piece of software mentioned above — DevonThink Pro Office. For now, I’ll ask you to ignore that bit, and focus on what’s happening to the file. I use the script to convert our “My Clippings.txt” file into multiple files. It goes in, finds a delimiter (any piece of text or syntax that repeats itself in the original file) and creates a new note/file every time it comes across this delimiter. In this way, you’ll quite quickly from the file shown above to something like this:

Now you have a note for every annotation and/or clipping. This is then something you can dump into Evernote, or keep in DevonThink. Again, more about the difference between these programmes in the next section. (Note, that you can use Tinderbox to split up the “MyClippings.txt” file as well using the “Explode” tool).

UPDATE (a little later on Friday night): Seb Pearce has just let me know that there are other options available for dealing with the 'My Clippings.txt' file. Check them out on his site.

The second problem raised on the Tim Ferriss podcast was Amazon’s limitations for clippings. This differs from publisher to publisher, it seems, so there’s no way of predicting it. An unfortunate rule of thumb: the more useful the book, the more likely the publisher has locked it down. When you’re making clippings inside the book, Amazon gives you no notification that you’ve reached the book’s limitations. But when you go to check your “My Clippings.txt” file to start using your notes, then you may find the note says:

"<You have reached the clipping limit set by the publishers>"

All the work you’ve done selecting pieces of text are for nothing, it would seem. The publisher has prevented you from using your book.

One solution is to remove the DRM from the book before you put it on your kindle. This is legal so long as you’re not sharing the book with other people (as this process would theoretically allow you to do).7 Follow this link to find out how to de-DRM your Kindle and iBooks documents. You can also visit libgen.org to download an already-DRMed copy of the book you’ve purchased. These will often be in .epub format so you’ll have to convert these over to a .mobi format if you want to use them on your kindle device. (To convert from .epub to .mobi, use the free Calibre cross-platform software.)

If you read a de-DRMed copy of a kindle book on your kindle device, there will be no limitations as to how much you can annotate. The publishers limitations will all be gone. So that’s one option.

For those who aren’t comfortable removing the DRM on your books, you can get all your annotations out, but it comes with a little bit of hassle.

Here’s an example of what I mean (screenshot from my DevonThink library). I was reading in Hegghammer’s excellent Jihad in Saudi Arabia and making highlights (at 4:06am, apparently) but at some point I hit the limit imposed by the publisher.

 
 

The workaround to bypass this limit from the publisher is to first export all your notes out of your “MyClippings.txt” file. So all your clippings are saved, even though some of them may not work. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the final three notes aren’t working because of the publisher’s limitatations. That’s the case in the screenshot above. What you do is (again, once you’ve backed up the clippings txt file) delete three of the earlier clippings that you already have. Then you sync your Kindle to the server and it will think that you have clipped three less quotes, so these will then become available (both in the myclippings.txt file and on the website. Like I said, it’s a bit fiddly. I would much rather remove the DRM completely and not have this hassle at all, though when you do that Amazon will not sync your clippings to the cloud and to their kindle.amazon.com database. You’ll have to export them using the tools I mentioned above.

Keeping Up With The Joneses, or How to Use Instapaper to Clip Web Articles

This may be something completely idiosyncratic to my own workflow, but I don’t enjoy reading articles in a web browser. I’d also prefer not to be hijacked into reading all these articles. For instance, when I’m in Tweetbot/Twitter or Facebook and I see a link that I like, I will almost never read that article then and there. Rather, I’ll send it to my Instapaper queue.

First, a quick word about Instapaper vs Pocket. I use Instapaper. I started off with them, switched over to Pocket for about two years, and now I’m back with Instapaper. They’re both more or less the same. Instapaper happens to be what I’ve chosen for myself because of their handy Kindle service. (If you have articles in your queue, you can have Instapaper send the most recent articles to your Kindle at a particular time (i.e. first thing in the morning) which you can then clip and archive to your heart’s content.) Both Pocket and Instapaper work with what follows, so just pick one and stick to it. I’d recommend Instapaper because they allow for the sharing of the full texts of articles and because of the Kindle digest feature.

I find I have so much to stay on top of and keep tracking online, I can’t just click around and read things as and when I see them online. I schedule time apart for reading of my Instapaper queue (and for reading books on my Kindle) and only read during those times. (I do the same with email, only checking and responding to email between the hours of 12-1pm and 5-6pm each day. The rest of the day email is off and disabled. I even deleted my email account on my iPhone as inspired by this medium.com post.)

My workflow with web articles is to follow as much as possible via RSS. I prune the sites I’m following every three months, but in general the number is stable around 650. I use Newsblur as my RSS reader, and every time I find an article I’d like to read (later), I use the handy ‘send to instapaper’ bookmarklet. This sends the article to my Instapaper queue.

The same goes for twitter. I follow enough people on Twitter for it to be impossible for me to read every post that passes through my stream. I will dip once or twice a day, however, to see what people are saying. I use two services to monitor my Twitter and Facebook streams to pick out the most-shared articles to ensure that I don’t miss the big sharks of the day. They’re both free, and I’d strongly recommend you signing up and getting their daily summaries of what people were talking about on Twitter that day. News.me has been around for a while and I trust their article selection. Nuzzel is newer, but it seems to have a few more options. I guess you could probably do with picking only one of the two.

After reading articles on my Kindle (or sometimes on a mobile device like my iPad or iPhone), you can clip the article if you want to save it (just like making a clipping inside a book, only the entire article is saved).

 

This is what you see in an article when you click to "Clip This Article" on a kindle...

 

Then your clippings will be captured in the ‘MyClippings.txt’ file as explained above and you can export them directly to DevonThink or Evernote or Tinderbox. (The main downside to doing things this way is that when the kindle clips it, all formatting is lost (including paragraph breaks)).

Alternatively, you can ‘Favourite’ the article. I use this setting because it then sends the article and URL to my @stricklinks twitter account, something I created to share the best things I was reading. It also saves the full text of the article to Pinboard (a service I’ve already written about on my blog here) and to Evernote. (I use If This Then That to facilitate this.)

Once I’m done reading, I can go into Evernote and all my articles are waiting for me to be sorted through. Because I use DevonThink as my everything-bucket, and because all the sorting and discoverability features are there, I have a separate stage of exporting my notes out of Evernote into DevonThink. I’ve already probably taken you a little too far down the rabbit-hole of my workflow, but this is an important stage because otherwise you can’t do anything with your notes.

Luckily, someone has written a script which makes this possible. Many many thanks to the good people at Veritrope for updating the script every time updates to the software get released. It’s fairly self-explanatory. You select the notes that you want to export, choose which DevonThink folder you want to export to and then it goes to work. It can occasionally be buggy and stop half-way through, but usually a little trial-and-error will let you pinpoint which Evernote note is causing the problem and you can transport that one over manually.

I usually do an export session to bring everything from Evernote into my DevonThink inbox once a week. This way the number of clippings doesn’t get too out of control, and I’m not constantly playing around with this during the week. You might find this all is overkill, but it has become an essential part of my workflow to store the various things I’m reading on a daily basis.

Pillaging Your Hard Copies, AKA Living the Paperless Dream

You may have hardcover copies of books that you want to use as part of this system. One way to use them is to scan the books into your DevonThink library. DevonThink Pro Office comes with an OCR package (via ABBYY FineReader) so whatever you scan can then become searchable and useful.

In the past, particularly with books I’ve purchased in Afghanistan and Pakistan that are unlikely (read: never) to be made available as electronic versions, I take a Stanley knife to the bindings, feed the pages into my ScanSnap scanner which scans both sides and compiles all the scans into a single PDF document that is searchable on my laptop. The whole process is destructive of the book, but it gives the text inside a new life. Given how fast the new ScanSnap models work (around 25 pages per minute, both sides), this is an attractive way to get digital access to materials that are only available in paper form.

You can highlight text within the resulting PDFs and then later export your clippings from those PDFs as notes into DevonThink. There’s another useful script to help with that. It only works with the free Skim PDF reader, but that’s my default PDF reader so it works out well.

For more on paperless workflows, check out David Sparks’ Field Guide on the topic.

3. Discovery & Meaning

If you made it this far, congratulations. This is the section where all the fiddling with export starts to take on some meaning. After all, we’re not reading and exporting these notes purely because we are hoarders or to fetishise the art of collection (though in some cases, that may be what’s going on). No, we are taking notes because we are trying to understand difficult topics, because we are trying to solve important problems.

Discovering Links and Connections

The Steve Berlin Johnson articles referenced earlier are an essential first stop, particularly in demonstrating how DevonThink can add some serendipity into how you use your individual notes. To give you an example of how this works, here’s a screenshot from my ‘TalQaeda’ database that I put together while working on An Enemy We Created:

 
 

In the upper part you can see a bunch of notes relating to the Haqqani family. The lower left part is the contents of a note (Note: exported from Instapaper). The bottom right list of documents (under “See Also”) is a list of notes that may be related to this particular quote. This is the magic algorithmic sauce I mentioned earlier that makes DevonThink so powerful.

If I click through to some of those suggested notes, I’m taken to similar quotes on the same topics, two PDFs of reports (of dubious analytic value, but that’s a separate issue), three clippings from Kindle books where people are making reference to the relationship between the Haqqanis and al-Qaeda (the subject of the original note). Note that I didn’t have to pre-tag documents for this ‘see also’ functionality to work its magic. It analyses inside the text and makes its suggestions based on the similarities it identifies. (Needless to say, it’s not simply a matter of matching individual words. Some of the suggested notes don’t mention al-Qaeda or the Haqqanis by name, but they are implied; DevonThink catches this all).

Once you start to build up a decent database of notes (my Afghanistan database has just under 65 million words of notes, including 12,800+ PDFs) this ‘See Also’ functionality really allows for some unexpected links to be made, especially when you’re at the stage of writing up a project/book. One note will lead to another note, which will lead to another note. If you follow these trails of notes (like breadcrumbs) you can develop a pretty idiosyncratic picture.

I do not know of a manual method which allows for this kind of process.

DevonThink has an extremely robust search function which allows you to find things along similar principles (including a very useful ‘fuzzy spelling’ option, perfect when checking my database for notes on someone whose first name could be spelt Mohammad, Muhammad, Mohammed or any of the other variations).

Figuring Out What It All Means

Once you have an idea of the outlines of the topic, once you’ve been taking notes for a while, your database in DevonThink is probably starting to fill with useful information.

If you’re writing a book, though, you’ll want to start writing alongside this gathering process. (Check out Michael Lopp’s overview of the process of writing a large research book, which, to my mind, is fairly accurate.)

I don’t find DevonThink a particularly pleasant place to write, so I do that elsewhere. Before I write things out in long form, I usually do some outlining, particularly if it’s something where the dense collection of factual detail is important to the development of the argument (as was the case with An Enemy We Created). For this, I find Tinderbox indispensable for working up an overview of what I know, for figuring out how I’m going to structure it, and for helping me put together my first draft.

Tinderbox can display notes in a number of different ways. You can view your documents as outlines, as maps, or even as timelines:

 
 

In this image you can see the information arranged as an outline, but here (below) you see the same information organised as a map (mirroring the actual layout of the map of those districts in a particular part of Kandahar):

 
 

Just to show you that it can handle complexity, here’s a map created by Felix to help him figure out how people involved in militant Islamism were/are connected across different geographical sectors:

It's complicated...

I’ll often use Tinderbox maps to store outlines for how I’ll write a particular section or chapter, making notes inside the document, dragging quotes in from DevonThink to supplement the argument that’s being constructed.

Getting to the point where you can actually start writing on the basis of your notes is the whole point of all of this. Technology is useful, but mainly when directed at a specific problem or goal. All the tips, tricks and software described in this post has helped me write books, reports and (coming soon!) even my doctoral thesis/PhD. I have encountered only a few (barely a handful) researchers who use their computers for this collation, sifting and discovery process. There’s no way to keep it all in your head. Here’s hoping more people start adopting these tools…

Footnotes:

  1. For many years, Amazon offered users the ability to let publishers know that you wanted to see title X or Y on a Kindle format, but they failed to make this piece of interaction useful by keeping track of what you'd requested of publishers (so as then to be able to let you know when it was finally released in Kindle format). ↩
  2. Excerpt From: Mark Bernstein. “The Tinderbox Way.” iBooks. ↩
  3. Selective transcript from around the 50-minute mark in the podcast audio. Needless to say, the rest of this blogpost constitutions a ‘viable solution’. ↩
  4. Most of these are derived from other people, I should say. I try to give credit where I can, but sometimes I can’t remember where I first read something or who first recommended a particular tool or trick. ↩
  5. Yes yes, I know, I’m going to leave out some mentions for useful software here. This is an overview, and I’m just trying to describe some options for what might work in certain situations. ↩
  6. A clipping is when you have selected and copied a passage from the book for safe-keeping, and an annotation is when you yourself write a note connected to a particular passage. ↩
  7. Needless to say, don’t take legal advice from me. ↩

Sources & Methods: Podcast Follow-Up

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We're five episodes old! The small podcast I started together with Matt Trevithick is coming along nicely. In our most recent episode, we talk with programmer and note-taker Mark Bernstein. Mark is the force behind the notetaking and outlining software, Tinderbox, much beloved by knowledge workers. This episode is about note-taking, its uses and why people need to think reflexively about the work they're doing.

It seems to have struck a chord with listeners: we've had three times as many as usual. That could also have been helped by a mention over at The Atlantic from James Fallows:

Mark Bernstein is the creator of intriguing idea-organizing Mac software called Tinderbox, which I've mentioned over the years. I have never met him but have often corresponded; three years ago, he was a guest blogger here. This week, in a podcast interview for the Sources and Methods site, he talks not so much about his software but about the larger question of how thinking interacts with the tools of the electronic age. If you find the podcast provocative, you might well be interested in the book The Tinderbox Way, which is equal parts guide to Bernstein's Tinderbox program and meditation on the right and wrong approach to "information farming." As you'll gather from the podcast and see in the book, the kind of farming he has in mind is nothing like mega-scale factory farming and very much like an artisanal plot.

The Director of Teaching and Learning, for the Bedford/St. Martin's imprint of Macmillan Education publishing house wrote a blogpost about the episode in which he recommended educators give it a listen:

There's a lot in the discussion that maps on to teaching writing, teaching research, teaching thinking, and faculty development for those professors who want to help students get better at writing, research, and thinking. The interview can be assigned in time points for students, or one might scroll to to a point and play a snippet as a way to launch a discussion. For students especially, this discussion focuses on the role of noting, of seeing and recording, and in the act of doing so, of thinking, organizing, and find order. In a way, it's about slowing down, of taking the time to start a system that will serve a learner as a writer, and over time, as they change as writers, learn more, know more, and will find it more and more useful to be able to go back into their reading and writing history to recall, reorganize, and rethink, note taking as a key element for revision.

I've added a number of podcasts to my regular queue in Overcast and in case you could use some recommendations, the following are almost always worth a listen, especially if you like the kinds of things you hear on Sources and Methods:

A Jedi-Mind Trick and Three Other Approaches to Learning Vocabulary

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UPDATE: I now offer one-on-one language coaching. Read more about what it involves and what kinds of problems it's best suited to addressing.

[My last post on the study of languages seems to have been well-received so I thought I'd add a few thoughts on the study of vocabulary. For some reason it's another stumbling block for many people who lack a system to be able to manage their vocabulary learning. I hope that by the time you finish reading this post you'll have some approaches and tools to think about, at the very least.] There are three things you need to know about and do when it comes down to learning vocabulary, possibly four.

1. Word Association

This is pretty basic stuff as far as vocab learning goes, but if you don't know it it can be something of a revelation. See this (and click through the following links) for a basic outline.

The basic task here is to associate the meaning along with the sound of the word.

The trick with word association is to make the images in your head as crazy as possible. You need to make it stick in your mind, so the more outrageous the image, the more it's going to stick. You might think it takes too long to imagine these scenes/images (that I'll describe) but it'll pay off in the long-run.

So, what you have to do is take a word and mentally associate it with its meaning. Take the Arabic word mumill (meaning 'boring'). Close your eyes if you need to. When I see that word, I think of two things -- MOO (the sound that the cow makes) and then a flour MILL. And somehow I have to try to associate those two things with the concept of 'boring'. So I imagine a flour mill, an old slightly dusty stone flour mill. You can hear the slow grinding of the mill on the flour, grinding it down to a fine powder. You can smell a bit of the flour in the air; perhaps the particles in the air are brushing against your face, getting in your hair. You can see the dark stone. When you touch the mill itself, it's a bit warm to the touch from all the grinding it's been doing. When you turn and look to see who's driving/pushing the millstone, to your surprise you see that it's a cow, who makes a gratifyingly loud 'MOO' sound when she sees you. When the cow walks past, you can smell the 'cow smell' and she's warm to the touch as well (having worked so hard). You see that she's extremely bored doing her milling, and you see that in one paw/hand/foot she has a sudoku game (or whatever) that she's doing while she pushes the millstone around and around to stop herself from being too bored.

Anyway, that's more or less what you have to do for every word. Split it up into sounds and then do this word association. The important things are to:

a) use all the senses (sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing) in your association, because that's what will make it really stick in your mind and

b) make the images/scenes you create as wild as possible.

Learning professionals usually suggest to play on the deeper patterns, including things that are embarrassing etc etc, so try to bring all of that into your visualisation. Also, personalise the images. It needs to resonate FOR YOU. Use objects that evoke very specific and strong emotions: love, sex, war, your late relative, object of your infatuation, whatever it is; it is well known that emotional states and the full sensory palette can facilitate recall.

The point with all of this isn't that you are going to remember all of this image when you hear the word 'mumill'. Your brain will move much faster than that, and you'll just get a glimpse at the image and that'll be enough to jog your memory to provide the translation 'boring'. After a while (I'll explain below), you won't need the image any more, but it'll be there if you need it.

For Arabic, one of the issues is often that you have a long list of verbs, all with 3 letters with the same vowelling -- darasa, faqada, hamala etc etc -- and that can sometimes make it difficult to distinguish the words. But, like I said, split them up into two parts if you can, or find some way to make them stand out or associate them with something you already know.

2. Iversen's Lists

You should have gone through your list of words that you have to memorise and do this for every single word. I will assume that you will have a bit of learning to do each week or each day, incrementally, rather than getting all your words at once to learn for the entire year all in one go.

So do the association technique first. Then take a blank piece of paper -- A4 is good (or whatever the US equivalent is) -- and write a list of the words you have to learn today on the left side of the page. Try not to take up too much space. Maybe it's 20 words. Write them down on the left side of the page.

Then take a ruler or draw a line alongside that list and to the right of the line, (perhaps in a different colour pen), write the translation of that word. Do that for all the words. If you don't know the word, then the memorisation image/association hasn't stuck, so you can look up the correct answer and make sure that your association sticks this time.

Once you've completed this first test, take another piece of paper (or, better still, something thicker like a book so you can't cheat) and cover up the first column. Now you only have your answers to look at, and you should draw another line and then write the translations. (i.e. translating things back into the original language). Do all the translations for the list, then check whether you got them right.

Then you should repeat this until the entire piece of paper (both sides) are covered with translations back and forth. If you write small-ish, you should be able to get a good 6 or 7 rounds of translations/testing in (if not more).

Perhaps don't do all of these sessions at once. Do one side of the page in one go, and then leave other sessions for later in the day (for reasons I'll explain now).

3. Spaced Repetition & Anki

The really Jedi vocabulary learning trick requires that you know a bit about how the mind works and how quickly we forget. Take a look at this graph. This basically shows how the memory forgets.

forgettingcurve
forgettingcurve

So, following the red line, when you first learn a word (or a piece of information, or anything) if you try to remember it within an hour or so, the memory is pretty good. If you try to recall that fact 6 days later (without any study in between), you'll see (by following the red line to day 6) that the memory for such facts can swiftly decline pretty quickly.

There is a way to avoid this, though, which is something called spaced repetition. Because this half-life or rate of decline of memory is predictable (i.e. everyone has this curve, and how quickly it takes you to forget stuff is more or less stable/calculable), if you remind yourself of the word or fact within certain times, then you will be able to 'reset' the forgetting curve. The great thing about this 'reset' process, is that each time you do it, it takes longer to forget.

For example, let's say you learned the word for mumill just now. You'd ideally want to recall that word 30 minutes after you learned it. Then an hour later, then 3 hours later, then 6 hours later, then 12 hours later, then 24 hours later, then 3 days later, then 1 week later, then 3 weeks later, then 5 weeks, then 2.5 months etc etc).

So if you keep catching the words at the point just before you forget them, you can steadily put the fact/word deeper into your long-term memory.

But, you may ask, how do you remember when the last time you tested yourself on a particular word? How do you ensure that you catch this 'forgetting curve' and know how far along you are with memorisation...

Luckily, a bunch of people have already taken care of this and thought it through, and there's a piece of software which will save your life. I wish I'd had it when I was learning languages at university.

It's called Anki, and you can download it here. They've just released version 2.0. It's free. There are other imitations, but Anki is really the gold standard here. Don't bother looking around. Anki is the real deal.

So with this programme you create a 'collection' of words. You have to input your vocabulary (just one side -- i.e. just Arabic-English or English-Arabic) into the programme. Once one person has done it, then you can share the decks of flashcards (either online or as offline files), so you can immediately become the most popular person on your course if you do a full collection for your course, I would guess. (For more obscure languages, and I include Pashto in this pantheon, there are some true heros who assemble vocabulary lists and upload them to sharing sites for others to use).

Anyway, once you've inputted the cards, it will test you on the words in both directions (i.e. Eng-Ar as well as Ar-Eng) automatically.

Then you just start learning. You can state how many new words you want to learn each day. I'd recommend no more than 20. And, IMPORTANT POINT, you should do steps 1 and 2 (as I explained above) BEFORE you do a round with Anki. i.e. first do the word association stuff, then do a day learning the words with the lists and the blank piece of paper and the columns, and then the next day you should learn those words in Anki. It'll auto-test you the words and you pick an option whether the word was easy to remember, hard, very hard, or whether you didn't remember it at all.

Depending on which option you pick for each word (when you see the answer), it'll then remember which forgetting curve to assign to the word, and it'll remind you that you need to review that piece of vocabulary/fact at the appropriate time.

So let's say in 1 month from now, the word mumill shows up on the screen, and you eventually remember it, but it took a bit of time. You press 'very hard to remember' and it'll remind you of that word in 18 days (approx) since it recognises that you need a bit more time before it really ends up in your longer-term memory.

Then once you've started with Anki, you just have to make sure to return to Anki once a day and study the words that show up for review. Luckily there is a mobile version of Anki available (for iPhone/iPad as well as Android). I'll assume you have a phone which is either an iphone or an android. The mobile versions you have to pay for. But it's completely worth it.

This means that whenever you're stuck in a bus, or waiting in a queue or something, you just need to pull out your phone and you can review a few words on Anki. It has all the same features as the desktop version (apart from the ability to add words, I think). It's also a good idea to include audio along with each vocab entry which will be another sensory association and input that will help imprint the word in your mind.

The trick here, and it's really important, is to do it every day. If you only do it once a week, then you'll forget words more often (as the forgetting curve means you'll have missed the chance to reactivate or 'reset' the curve on words during the week). I really strongly recommend you do your Anki words once a day. Some days there won't be any words, or very few (depending on how many your course has you learning).

4. (Writing/Reading for Extra Imprinting)

If you really want to get to a high level in your vocab learning, then use it to support your more general skills. i.e. you should use the vocab words in context.

When I use Anki, I sometimes like to take each word (when it comes up on the screen for testing/study) and before I give my answer, I first make myself use that word in a sentence. This allows me to practice grammar structures, and also creates new associations for that word with other pieces of material. (For the memory, more associations are better, since things are recalled via these webs/networks of signals in the mind). Even better, write these sentences down (although by now we're talking study/exercises that take a bit of time, rather than just Anki etc, which would take maximum 20 minutes per day).

The ideal place for practicing your writing is lang-8.com, where you can get a free account. The principle here is that everyone corrects everyone else. i.e. when you put up a few sentences of writing practice, native Arabic speakers (or whatever language) will correct your sentences, but ideally you should correct their English sentences etc to return the favour. It's all free, and done on an honour system, so you get as much as you give etc.

I use it for my Urdu, Arabic and Pashto studies, and you'll usually get a correction for things you post there within 12-24 hours, which is pretty amazing when you think about it.

Another really good way to reinforce your vocabulary is to read a lot. Most of the studies of language study and learning (see last week's post) now agree that 'intensive reading practice' is the best way to build up your vocabulary. Obviously, you need to start with texts that are somewhat comprehensible and then slowly build up, and it can be really difficult. Sometimes you think that you're just reading gobbledegook. But slowly, if you stick at it, weeks later, you'll be able to read more and more, and you'll be learning words without the need to memorise and go through all the systems above (although if the word's giving you problems, or if you'd really like to remember it, then by all means add it to Anki etc) because you'll be using and seeing that word in the context of the sentence / words around it etc.

...

Anyway, none of this is a substitute for the somewhat-hard work that goes into learning vocabulary, but it certainly can shortcut things. Particularly if you start inputting your vocabulary into Anki early on in the course of your language studies, and reviewing it every day throughout the year, by the end of a year you'll be in a really good place compared to others.

Useful Tools: Pinboard

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This is the first in a series of posts I'll be doing on this blog detailing some software or web services that I use. I'll try to end each post with two examples of things I've used the software for recently. Pinboard is an online bookmarking service. I save all the articles I read online there with a handy bookmarklet, and everything I read in Instapaper and via twitter also gets saved there. Even better, if you upgrade to a premium subscription, Pinboard's servers will make an archive copy of the site so even if it is taken offline, you'll still have a copy of the site. And before you say that other services do it better, read this.

It's handy for sharing collated link collections with people and it's useful just as an archive of everything you've been reading.

Two recent uses of Pinboard:

  1. I keep a rolling list of all the reviews and comments on my recent edited book, Poetry of the Taliban. You can see this here. These kinds of lists are great for sharing with other people.
  2. The other day I remembered I had read something online, but couldn't quite remember where, so I searched within my Pinboard archive (including the text of all the websites I'd visited and read articles from in the past two weeks), finding the article within seconds.