Tag Archives: Note-Taking

TiddlyWiki Review

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Here at Commons Knowledge we like to talk about all of the various options out there for personal and information management tools, so today we’re talking about TiddlyWiki!

“It’s like a hypertext card index system from the future” -Jeremy Ruston, in the TiddlyWiki intro video

To summarize: this is a British, somewhat tricky to use, free and open source note taking and information management linked web wiki platform made in Javascript. TiddlyWiki is mostly used for task management. Still, if you’re looking for a way to manage all of your information and feeling particularly adventurous (and not at all into aesthetics, as TiddlyWiki is an ugly website — though CSS customization is possible) you might enjoy TiddlyWiki.

Everything in TiddlyWiki is a small piece, a tiddler —  a British word for a small fish — which you can stack, arrange, and link however you like. Tiddlers are individual units that you can incorporate into larger tiddlers through a process called “transclusion.” To have a tiddler all you need is a title. This is very similar to Scalar CMS where all content is equal, and can be linked or embedded in each other to tell both linear and nonlinear stories. However, TiddlyWiki is not as pretty and is focused more on note-taking and information management than presentation.

An example of a Tiddler

There are a lot of options for customization, as well as an active community that keeps the project alive and adds new customization options for different purposes (such as for writing a thesis). There is a WYSIWYG editor and formatting options, though you will still need to become familiar with the WikiText language in order to use more interesting formatting and customization. The WikiText language is similar to Markdown. There is also a plugin that will let you write your tiddlers in Markdown if you are more familiar and comfortable with that. You can add images and scribble all over them, as well as save links to websites with a download and some difficulty. TiddlyWiki includes search functionality and tagging, which is especially useful, as you can click on a tag you get a list of pages that have that tag. There are encryption plugins, which I have not tested, to create password-protected tiddlers and offer some basic security (though neither I nor the creators of TiddlyWiki endorse putting sensitive information on one of these sites).

You can use TiddlyWiki with TiddlySpot, Tiddly Desktop, or various browsers as well as node.js or a variety of other options for saving the program. Get started here.

Setting up where your files save so you can find them again is probably the hardest part of setting up a TiddlyWiki. It creates one HTML file that you update as you save. If you’re using Firefox and using the Firefox plugin I recommend downloading an empty wiki and copying it from your Downloads and pasting it to your G:Drive or another place where files aren’t deleted automatically. After, you can click on the cat icon and set it to automatically save your changes to your file on the Desktop.

Clicking on

Note: Don’t save things to the Desktop on Scholarly Commons computers long-term, as files are routinely erased.

Let us know in the comments if you have any other personal information management systems that need more love!

Utilizing EverNote to Keep Your Research Organized

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Sick of juggling Word documents and notebooks? Trying to find a way to keep your research organized? EverNote may be the tool you need!

EverNote is a popular program that can be accessed from the web, but also downloaded as software on your computer, or as an app on your mobile device or tablet. It is, at its core, built for note-taking and storing information. The free plan allows up to 60 MB of uploads per month (which is typically more than enough for most people), or you can buy their “Plus” package for $34.99/year, or “Premium” for $69.99/year, which give increased storage options, as well as special features.

Academically, EverNote is a great tool if you’re taking lots of notes on various sources. You can store groups of notes in “notebooks,” tag notes with key ideas, as well as upload photos or documents from elsewhere. EverNote syncs up between devices, which can be helpful if you don’t want to lug your laptop from place to place and want to use your tablet to take notes instead.

Now, I’ll walk you through the EverNote interface, and explain how I used EverNote to organize research I did on nineteenth-century cookbooks and food at the Massachusetts Historical Society last summer.

When you log into EverNote, you’ll be taken to a page that includes all of the Notes you’ve taken.

Here's my homepage.

Here’s my homepage.

Now, if you’re working on multiple projects, dealing with all of these at once can be kind of complicated. Thankfully, you have two ways to dwindle down what you’re looking for. The first is to go to your Notebooks. When you’re doing research in EverNote, it’s helpful to organize like-notes into a Notebook, so that they’re grouped together. So for my research project, I grouped my notes into a Notebook called “Boston.”

Tutorial 2 Edit

From there, I have a list of each individual Note that I took while at the MHS. You can sort the way the list appears – I just happen to have them sorted by the Date Updated. From there you can scroll around and find what you’re looking for. But if you want to narrow down your results even more, you can use the search tool to look for keywords, either in a specific notebook or in all of your notes, or you can look for tags that you add to your notes. When you press the Tags button, a list of all the tags you’ve used for your Notes pops up. In this case, I want to look at everything I tagged with “Desserts.”

Tutorial 3 Edit

Tags are only useful if you implement them in the first place, so remember to tag your research as you go along!

A list of the Notes I took that I tagged with "Desserts."

A list of the Notes I took that I tagged with “Desserts.”

As you can see, that narrowed my results down to six results, as opposed to the forty-seven notes I had in my Boston Notebook.

Now, academic notetaking is just one way to use EverNote. EverNote prides itself on having many uses – from being a place of collaboration for offices, to keeping your various to-do lists in one place. It’s up to the user to decide how they would like to use EverNote.

Now, it’s not a perfect program. If a user wants to use some of the fancier aspects of the program, some of the controls are confusing and difficult to figure out at first. Further, I have had issues in the past with the app running slow on my tablet, or crashing in the middle of a note-taking session. (Of course, the notes save automatically and frequently, but it’s frustrating when you’re ten minutes from an archive closing and you’re trying to boot your app up again.) My biggest issue with Evernote, however, is the image-taking system.

At its core, the image-taking system is not a bad idea. However, by trying to make certain images text-searchable, it can ruin the integrity of the image itself. For example, I tried to capture an image of some of the handwritten notes in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s copy of The Young Housekeeper’s Friend, and the Evernote system bleached the pages out, and made the marginalia difficult to read.

Mary Hooker Cornelius, The Young Housekeeper's Friend: or, a Guide to Domestic Economy and Comfort, 1850. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Mary Hooker Cornelius, The Young Housekeeper’s Friend: or, a Guide to Domestic Economy and Comfort, 1850. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

All-in-all, EverNote can be a useful tool for a researcher on-the-go who is trying to stay organized while syncing along various platforms, as well as serving as an organizational tool for every day life!