rather random question...
...but I figure with this many academics and authors in fandom this is a good place to ask: I've been wondering what kind of software people use to keep track of quotes and other interesting bits of knowledge they accumulate and want to keep track of.
Not being into humanities in any professional capacity I never really started anything like a "Zettelkasten" (what do you call this kind of freeform bibliography/quotes/notes cards in English anyway? You know, the kind of thing that for famous authors and scholars used to be enormous amounts of cards accumulated and interlinked over decades and then bequeathed to archives, like the ones by Arno Schmidt or Niklas Luhmann?), so usually any notes I take on anything end up on various papers, cards, text files, notebooks without doing me any good in the long term, and for some kinds funny and/or insightful quotes keep a text file on my computer, and others for odds and ends that seem useful, but recently, after using bookmark sites with tags for a while, it occurred to me that it is completely moronic to try to keep track in such a scattered and inefficient way, even for just a smallish amount of data, and even for someone who doesn't strictly need such a knowledge organization, it would make sense to do it anyway if there was a convenient way to do so.
I mean, for example even simple things would be really nifty, say you just want to remember a cool quote, copy that, but then just type in say the ISBN of the book and the application looks up the book in one of the online database like that librarything site does and you don't have to type in all kinds of bibliographic data, because that would be filled in automatically, and then you could probably tag your quotes in such software like you can tag bookmarks. Besides, it would be really cool to have something that's able to keep track of picture references as well as text.
Seeing how this is something all kinds academics probably use, especially since they would also need things that format their bibliographies automatically according to all kinds of standards quickly anyway, I'm sure there must be a ton of such programs or maybe web versions of the same thing, so that you could combine your online bookmarks with your notes/quotes from offline stuff?
So, what do people use for this kind of thing? (Oh, and for me to be able to use it it needs to be either platform independent/online or available in a Linux version but I'd be interested in your experiences in any case.)
Not being into humanities in any professional capacity I never really started anything like a "Zettelkasten" (what do you call this kind of freeform bibliography/quotes/notes cards in English anyway? You know, the kind of thing that for famous authors and scholars used to be enormous amounts of cards accumulated and interlinked over decades and then bequeathed to archives, like the ones by Arno Schmidt or Niklas Luhmann?), so usually any notes I take on anything end up on various papers, cards, text files, notebooks without doing me any good in the long term, and for some kinds funny and/or insightful quotes keep a text file on my computer, and others for odds and ends that seem useful, but recently, after using bookmark sites with tags for a while, it occurred to me that it is completely moronic to try to keep track in such a scattered and inefficient way, even for just a smallish amount of data, and even for someone who doesn't strictly need such a knowledge organization, it would make sense to do it anyway if there was a convenient way to do so.
I mean, for example even simple things would be really nifty, say you just want to remember a cool quote, copy that, but then just type in say the ISBN of the book and the application looks up the book in one of the online database like that librarything site does and you don't have to type in all kinds of bibliographic data, because that would be filled in automatically, and then you could probably tag your quotes in such software like you can tag bookmarks. Besides, it would be really cool to have something that's able to keep track of picture references as well as text.
Seeing how this is something all kinds academics probably use, especially since they would also need things that format their bibliographies automatically according to all kinds of standards quickly anyway, I'm sure there must be a ton of such programs or maybe web versions of the same thing, so that you could combine your online bookmarks with your notes/quotes from offline stuff?
So, what do people use for this kind of thing? (Oh, and for me to be able to use it it needs to be either platform independent/online or available in a Linux version but I'd be interested in your experiences in any case.)