How can I organise a huge load of notes so I can handle it??

Question

I've typed up all my notes from scraps of papers/ notebooks etc etc onto my computer.. and now I have like 24000 words in idea/ list form!... I don't know how to organise it all so I can begin to assign different ideas to various parts of my work.. I'm basicly going to be using it all in some way.. but i'm kind of overwhelmed at the moment.. any ideas on how I can make progress with this?

Answer 1

It sort of depends a bit on what the notes are for- are you writing a novel, or is this for a course, or what?

Having said that, I can think of a few basic organisation methods- One would be alphabetical- put all the files that begin with a together into an 'a' folder, and so on.

Then there's thematic- put together all the stuff that has a similar subject into the same folder, and keep doing that until it's all sorted.

How about Chronological- put the stuff you wrote first into the same folder, and keep going until you reach the end.

You may want to put it all in alphabetical or chronologic order first, then sort it into themes once you have achieved that. Doing the easier sorting will give you ideas for the more detailed sorting later on as well. 24,000 words of lists is quite a lot, about a dissertation and a half's worth of words... and as they are lists and raw ideas, quite concentrated, probably enough data for a good book or two if you can only get a handle on it...

Making a folder with Windows is pretty easy, right click on a bare bit of desk top, then click on 'new folder', then write the folder name. Yeah, simple stuff, you know this, right?

Answer 2

I use Word for exactly this sort of thing. My daily journal is one long  Word document that gets backed up and stored each January 1.

The nice thing about word processing software documents is that they are easy to search (key words), editable, printable, you name it.

Because you have access to all your fonts, you can even assign certain subjects a specific font, i.e., funny weird things could always appear in a decorative fonts such as "Jokerman."

More of these ideas will just pop into your head once you start using the software.

Make sense?

Kabum

Answer 3

Firstly you need to do a mind map of your information.

Break it down into categories and identify the relationships between the categories.

There are lots of software available to store and organise this information. One of the best is WikiPad which lets you create personal Wikis. You can easliy create a category by typing a WikiWord ( ie a string of words starting in Uppercase ) and double clicking on it.

WikiPad allows you to import information from other documents, and export in html,xml and wiki file formats.

WikiPad runs on Windows, Linux and MacOs and is free.

It can be downloaded from http://www.jhorman.org/wikidPad/