Friend of The Interconnected Roz Duffy recently wrote How to Go Down the Rabbit Hole, a guide to mapping your path through the rabbit holes of research we often fall into.
Something grabs your attention and holds it. If you frame it as though it is an invitation, a call to adventure, a portal opening just for you, it becomes a lot more exciting.
Another friend of The Interconnected, Lisa Maria Marquis, pointed out the similarities between the idea of mapping one’s trip through the rabbit hole and Celine Nguyen’s post, research as leisure activity. Celine’s post concentrates on what it means to do research, what it means to do research for fun, and who the folks doing research as a leisure activity tend to be.
I was struck by this paragraph in particular.
What’s also striking to me is that autodidacts often begin with some very tiny topic, and through researching that topic, they end up telescoping out into bigger-picture concerns. When research is your leisure activity, you’ll end up making connections between your existing interests and new ideas or topics. Everything gets pulled into the orbit of your intellectual curiosity. You can go deeper and deeper into a narrow topic, one that seems fascinatingly trivial and end up learning about the big topics: gender, culture, economics, nationalism, colonialism. It’s why fashion writers end up writing about the history of gender identity (through writing about masculine/feminine clothing) and cross-cultural exchange (through writing about cultural appropriation and styles borrowed from other times and places) and historical trade networks (through writing about where textiles come from).
One of my biggest challenges as a fiction writer is remembering where I found some important tidbit that shapes out some plot point, because I want to a) make sure I got it right and b) go back and build upon it later. My link collection is sizable and still not fully migrated out of its original tools.
But I’m not the only web builder I know who’s also building webs of information on the side – most of my friends and acquaintances keep their notes and discoveries somewhere to come back to. There are lots of tools that enable us to be amateur research gatherers. The question then becomes: are there any preferred tools? The answer appears to be no, because each of the authors below brings a different set of preferences and needs to the activity. Still, learning how people store their treasures is always worthwhile!
anne gibson
Early use of wikis at work gave me a love/hate relationship with the total flexibility of the wiki information architecture. The bad: people who are not trained in design tend to emphasize parts of the content library that are only important to them. The good: when writing for an audience of one, you can store your treasures any way you like because you’re the only one who has to be able to find them again.
That realization, combined with the fact that the “read later” list on my Safari browser was actively crashing the browser when loaded, led me to create the Perpendicular Angel Knowledge Base. I initially only intended to use it for UX-related learnings, but, as Celine pointed out, everything eventually connects to everything else. Plus, it is a handy place to keep my writing resources.
Katie Donnelly
As a lifelong researcher and writer, I am embarrassed to admit that I don’t have many structured research storage systems. When I was kid, I always dreamed of being the kind of organized student who kept a color-coded Trapper Keeper full of precisely labeled notes. But I was a messy, precocious child with a photographic memory. I never took notes in school because I could remember whole passages of books—and if I couldn’t remember the whole passage, I always knew exactly where to find it. This hold-it-all-in-my-brain system worked fine for me in a mostly analog world. But as the volume of available information became more and more intense and my memory became less sharp, I somehow assumed my system of holding it all in my head and a giant collection of random half-scribbled notebooks would hold.
Alas, it has not.
Over the years, I have experimented with a variety of different collection systems, some of which worked better than others. I want to love Notion but for some reason, I just can’t. For more focused research endeavors, I generally use Airtable, which gives me that sense of color-coded organization I always wanted as a child. I also keep long Google doc lists, which is not the best for organization but is great for stashing quick thoughts and collaborating with others. My current workaround for saving articles on topics I am tracking is to Slack them to myself. I have a long Slack conversation with myself that I review monthly and decide if I actually want to read the articles. Ones that are highly relevant go into an Airtable database. Are there more efficient systems to do this? Absolutely. But this works for me, because I am in Slack all day anyway (plus, I kind of like my long history of conversation with myself!). As I continue to experiment with different systems, I am resisting the urge to do research in a pre-defined “right” way, and instead embracing the systems and strategies that work with my particular brain and ways of working.
Lisa Maria Marquis
Early in my UX career, when I was devouring every bit of writing I could find on every topic that might one day be even a little relevant to my work, I used a bookmarking site to manage my personal research. Its versatile tagging system was not only a helpful way to organize my ever-growing collection of UX articles, but also an intrinsic part of my learning: clicking on any tag I’d made—say, navigation—let me see everything topical all at once. Instead of reviewing an individual article about navigation, I could see it in conversation with every article about navigation, which created new context and enhanced my synthesis.
Eventually, though, I stopped using my bookmarks. As I grew in my career and internalized the lessons of my research, I became less reliant on revisiting my sources. And as the UX industry developed, so too did the available writing about it; abundance made saving links seem less urgent. (This is no longer the case; independent publishing has dried up, and Google search is a hallucinatory swamp. Really, if ever there was a need for a well-tagged repository of UX guidance, it’s now.) I slowed my searching, slowed my saving, slowed my referencing. After a while I realized I hadn’t opened the bookmarking site in years (and then the developer revealed himself as a terf and I deleted my account).
I still conduct personal research, but my needs are different now, and the internet is different too, and the resulting slack has made me sloppy in my tracking. I’ve tried a few alternative bookmarking apps, but none have stuck yet. So here’s where I reveal my actual, embarrassing system for managing my researched sources: I just copy and paste URLs into my notes app. Because most of my research is destined for my monthly newsletter, I always have a placeholder note open for the next issue. The URLs go into a bulleted list as I encounter them in the wild, and then later I click through, review, and gather my thoughts.
The disappointment of this method is that it fails to help me synthesize, track patterns, or build connections, and I often lose bits of knowledge along the way—like how I originally came across each URL, or what drew me to it in the first place. Even a poorly made system is still a system, however, and that’s the one I’m working with right now. Perhaps this missive can serve as gentle encouragement—to both of us—to investigate ever-so-slightly more formal methods of managing our personal research.
Elaine Nelson
I wish I had a consistent set of tools for this sort of thing. Over the years I have been a heavy user of delicious, pinboard, and Evernote; right now I bounce between Google Keep for things not attached to anything in particular and Google Docs for references attached to specific writing projects. I have at least two Google Docs right now that have multiple pages of links at the top of the document, one organized by chapter and one organized by theme. In Keep I have some subject tags, but also rely way too much on things being pinned at the top.
The two core problems for my own system(s), as I see them:
- Remembering that references exist! Would this be better if I had better tagging? Maybe. But maybe not. I had elaborate tagging systems in delicious and pinboard…and still that was where saved links went to die.
- Just, you know, Google. I was a heavy Reader user, back in the day, so I know what it’s like to have the rug pulled that way, plus [waves hands incoherently]. I am trying out Ellipsus for writing, and I like it but also it will take adjusting my whole system. I’ve got tabs open[1]The secret third system is open tabs, if I’m being quite honest, spread across laptop and phone, which is both incredibly fragile and wildly disorganized. Now I’m also remembering that I have a … Continue reading to look at Obsidian for the non-project-specific reference system, and maybe I’ll get there and maybe I won’t.
It’s possible this prompt will get me to do yet another attempt at a Grand Unified System of personal references. It’s just as likely that I will continue to limp along and use a hodge-podge of fragile idiosyncratic tools and processes. Ask me again in six months, I suppose.
Notes
| ↑1 | The secret third system is open tabs, if I’m being quite honest, spread across laptop and phone, which is both incredibly fragile and wildly disorganized. Now I’m also remembering that I have a Notion set up that I was going to try to use, but the only thing I keep up to date with it regularly is “stuff I might want to buy sometime soon”, which is kind of a different thing but still related. Plus stuff I send to friend in Slack or Discord, and then searching my DMs. |
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