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Voodoopad examples2/2/2024 ![]() While I don’t pore over research papers anymore, I do deal with a menagerie of documents-drawings, photographs, videos, test reports, deposition testimony, presentation slides, email trails-that are increasingly in some sort of electronic format. This is so much better than simply searching through abstracts or lists of keywords, all of which are words chosen by others.īut don’t just go by my description, read Walton’s own explanation of his system. The power of this system is that he can search through his VoodooPad document, which has his notes and therefore uses terminology that come naturally to him while searching, and when he finds what he’s looking for, he can click a link and be taken immediately to the right spot in the right paper. Each individual note in VoodooPad is linked to the page of the PDF to which it refers. So he has this VoodooPad document with his notes on the papers he’s read, which is nice, but that’s not the end. The Markdown is then turned into a new page in a VoodooPad document. When he’s done reading a paper, he runs an AppleScript that goes through the PDF and creates a Markdown document with all the paper’s annotations listed by page number and organized according to category (summary, reference, result, etc.). This may sound like nothing more than a digital version of Post-it notes, but Walton has an amazing trick up his sleeve. He adds color-coded annotations to the PDFs as he reads them: red for summaries, green for references, yellow for results, and so on. That research comes to him in the form of PDFs of journal papers. As a scientist, a good portion of his time is spent analyzing and synthesizing the research of others. To be sure, Walton’s system is highly tuned to the specifics of his profession. ![]() If you can listen to that 8- to 10-minute stretch without being inspired to improve your own methods for managing the flood of information in your job, then you’re dead to me. Shortly after the 24:00 mark in the latest episode of Gabe Weatherhead’s Generational podcast, Gabe’s guest, Walton Jones, starts talking about his system for annotating and summarizing academic papers.
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