Run a search for ‘Foucault’ in Evernote later and the software will pull up every instance in every page you save (warning: don’t do that search if, like me, you study prison). I find it doesn’t matter. Evernote’s OCR (optical character recognition) turns the picture into a searchable document with pretty amazing accuracy. You can be haphazard like me, or be more careful to capture only the words. When there’s a quote or a section you want to capture, create a new note in the Evernote app on your phone, hold the page down, and take a picture. How are you going to slam through those books while still retaining enough information to write 3,000 words in your lit review next month? Evernote on your smartphone will be your magic wand, Hermione. It’s Friday around 11am (ok, 1:30pm). You’ve made it to the library and sat down in front of a stack of 11 books on critical theory and you have a pub crawl in 5 hours. Organize your thoughts and the information you’re collecting in one place: Evernote, $45 per year I use a Mac, but this software all works well on PCs too. Here are the highlights of my techniques that you are welcome to steal for your own purposes. I use 3 excellent pieces of software to minimize the amount of time I spend re-reading books, hunting for forgotten citations, and hunched over a computer screen. So I put effort in at the front end of my writing process, while I was beginning to put together my literature review, to create a speedy and reliable work flow. I’d much rather be having a pint than reading Deleuze. I try to get my PhD work done as quickly, or rather as efficiently, as possible.
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