In other words, this is just a testimony in which I offer some personal reflections on the role ConnectedText plays in my own research, backed up by some reflections on the way this is related to the way in which I and many other scholars have used card indexes and journals during the precious century for keeping or making notes.
Some observations on digital note taking with an app from someone who'd previously spent time using card indexes.
https://app.inq.live/
in the offline world I am a big fan of Moleskine reporter’s notebooks. They are just the perfect size. I always said I wanted an iPhone the size of a Moleskine notebook, and that’s what the iPhone 6 Plus is.
While mostly a digital guy, Tom Standage uses Moleskine's reporter's notebooks which he likes because they're the size of an iPhone 6 plus.
iPhone 6+ (6.22 in x3.06 in)<br /> Moleskine reporter's notebook (3.5 x 5.5 inches)
1478-1518, Notebook of Leonardo da Vinci (''The Codex Arundel''). A collection of papers written in Italian by Leonardo da Vinci (b. 1452, d. 1519), in his characteristic left-handed mirror-writing (reading from right to left), including diagrams, drawings and brief texts, covering a broad range of topics in science and art, as well as personal notes. The core of the notebook is a collection of materials that Leonardo describes as ''a collection without order, drawn from many papers, which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place according to the subjects of which they treat'' (f. 1r), a collection he began in the house of Piero di Braccio Martelli in Florence, in 1508. To this notebook has subsequently been added a number of other loose papers containing writing and diagrams produced by Leonardo throughout his career. Decoration: Numerous diagrams.
https://www.val.town/
Val Town is a collaborative notebook for APIs
Quarto® is an open-source scientific and technical publishing system built on Pandoc
One of the biggest disadvantages of digital gardens, to me, is exactly the fact that it’s structured. That is, articles—whether they are blog posts or wiki pages do not matter—are still mainly text-based. You can’t quickly draw rectangles or arrows next to your notes. You can’t draw an eukaryote and point to its nucleus to explain that that’s where the DNA chromosome strings are coiled up (sorry, I’ve been doing some yeast cell research). You can’t print photos or cut out parts from newspapers to paste it besides a schematic. You can’t grab your watercolor paint and brighten up a page. You can’t paste your cat’s whisker in your notebook (for research purposes, of course!). You can’t smear out a blueberry or wet tea leaf to try and capture its smell and color.
A list of disadvantages of digital gardens versus paper-based notebooks.