Awhile back, I joined Bianca Pereira on Twitter Spaces to discuss knowledge management for research, specifically dealing with taking notes about history. Since Twitter Spaces recordings only last about a month, I wanted a permanent record of my thoughts on the topic; here it is. > ⚠️ There was discussion of child sacrifice in the ancient world; it's not graphic, but you've been warned. My main advice is to focus on specific facts & insights over broad topics; although obviously you need to know where those facts fit into a broad context, the more narrowly focused your pieces, the more easily it is to spin them out into lists and timelines of elements that really matter — not a "timeline of all of human history" (oh god) but rather things like overviews of domestication, or events in a particular war; instead of just a line graph, I like think of **timelines as branching maps of content**. ## Be aware of where labels and ideas come from The concepts we research didn't spring fully-formed from the head of Zeus; they came from somewhere. Historically, we've chunked groups into sections when studying the past — but in fact the actual people living in those times would not have recognized themselves in that way. I talked about this more in my article about [ancient identities](https://newsletter.eleanorkonik.com/ancient-identities-complex-cultures/) %% ( [[2021-09-26 Ancient Identities]] ) %%, but basically, the Hellenic identity shifted over time, insofar as it was ever clearly defined — a fact debated by the ancient Greeks themselves! When colonies change and move it gets messy to discuss that culture. American culture is separate from British culture which is separate from European culture — but all these cultures have links with Irish culture; immigration is a thing! It's the habit of historians and researchers and therefore most people to discuss broad identities — but they're artificial. This doesn't stop them from being _useful_, but it's something we shouldn't lose sight of. The concepts that we track change over time. The America of today is very different from America in the 1780s, and American education even more so. It helps to be specific when taking notes on these things, so that you can more easily — and accurately — remap information into different contexts. Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Canaanites, Tyrians, and Levantine people were in some ways the same people. They’re part of the same contiguous culture in the way that modern-day Australia is “British” in some important ways, and so is Wales. But in important ways, those are all distinct people, with distinct culture and identity. I'm an advocate of making notes as specific as possible. This doesn't mean that generalizations aren't ever appropriate — sometimes you need to be able to put useful labels on things, and synthesis is all about combining information to draw transferable conclusions. There is often the urge to place all the relevant information on a specific topic into a timeline. This helps with organization, but it can be beneficial to do the opposite of this — to think narrowly by pulling out pieces of information that are specific and relevant to the initial question. ## Be as specific as possible when recording evidence When writing about child sacrifice in the ancient world, "Phoenicians ritually sacrificed children until the second century CE" is a _very broad statement_ that is not, I think, the most _useful_ truth even if it is technically true. Rather than slapping "first known child sacrifice by a Phoenician" and "last known child sacrifice by a Phoenician" (what does "Phoenician" mean, anyway?) I prefer to have a note on "child sacrifice in the Punic world" filled with narrowly-tailed evidence: - child sacrifice in the Punic world continued under Roman occupation. - there is no evidence for child sacrifice in the Levant after the 6th c. BCE. - child sacrifice was banned in Jerusalem in the 7th c. BCE. - child sacrifice was banned in Africa in the 2nd c. CE. Once I discovered atomic notes and how this style of notetaking encourages the writing of specific facts and allows freedom to move into the connectedness of notes. For example, if I was researching where the people of Carthage traded with people of Sicily, instead of trying where to find where it should be filed or categorized, I would connect it and as the notes got bigger, I might realize I had enough information to write an [overview of cultures Carthage interacted with](https://newsletter.eleanorkonik.com/carthaginian-connections/) %% ( [[2022-02-05 Carthaginian Connections]] ) %%. It's easy to fall back on high school habits of making timelines of historical events that have remarkably little to do with what most of us are actually trying to _learn_ from history. Documenting the reign-dates of Medieval rulers is handy if you just need a quick reference guide. Such a list can be great evidence of turmoil; six emperors in as many years tells us something about what's going on in that period. If there's a sudden shift in German foreign policy, knowing that the kind died around that time is useful information. But writing encyclopedia-style longform overview style reference documents in one's personal notes is, I think, an inefficient approach. The beauty of a tool that encourages short files and quick navigation is that it allows us to get right to the heart of matters. Let's take the list of notes I had above: - child sacrifice in the Punic world continued under Roman occupation. - there is no evidence for child sacrifice in the Levant after the 6th c. BCE. - child sacrifice was banned in Jerusalem in the 7th c. BCE. - child sacrifice was banned in Africa in the 2nd c. CE. In addition to including them in a file titled "child sacrifice in the Punic world," I could include the last entry in a note about "laws created during the Pax Romana." The first entry fits neatly into an index tracking examples of Roman hypocrisy. ## Keeping track of where your information came from Bianca asked whether I've ever had to review notes because my understanding of a concept changed; the answer is yes. The method I'm describing allows for information to be remixed much more easily than longform articles, and brings me to one of the most frustrating pieces of advice I hear in personal knowledge management circles: the idea that all of our notes should be paraphrased and in our own words. It is my strongly-held believe that this is _dangerous_, because while yes you should absolutely respin a lengthy quote into a short, useful takeaway (I'm a big fan of claim statements) there is a lot of danger of introducing errors if you don't keep track of where your information came from. Imagine if you come across contradicting information. You can more easily reconcile the contradiction if you're in a position to [assess the reliability of your sources](https://eleanorkonik.com/evaluating-references/) %% ( [[How to Evaluate References]] ) %%. You can double-check whether your assumptions were supported in the original text. You can trace the year your source was working in and see if they just didn't have access to modern evidence — or maybe were less likely to ignore certain evidence due to modern cultural mores. Sometimes, anthropology from the 1800s is _more_ reliable than later works, because it filters less out. Imagine I find out that there's new evidence of child sacrifice in the Levant in the 4th c. BCE (perhaps uncovered during a new archaeological dig). It's easier to update all of the conclusions reliant on that outdated information... if changing the content of one file is reflected in all the files built off of that. How can we be sure of the truth if definitions change over time and across disciplines, and evidence gets updated? First: [there is no truth](https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/gustave_flaubert_161911). Second: be specific and keep track of where you got information from. It helps when you need to sit down and untangle the evidence and draw your own conclusions, as I was forced to do when deciding what to believe about [the early history of horse domestication](https://newsletter.eleanorkonik.com/early-pastoral-economies/) %% ( [[2021-04-26 Early Pastoral Economies of the Eurasian Plains]] ) %%. ## Context matters Words that mean different things get used in similar ways. For example, the word "democracy" means different things to different people in different contexts. Is it a system of rule by the people? Who are "the people" — male landowners of a particular ethnic group? Everyone who contributes money to the government? Everyone who lives within a government's territory? How do we define "rule" — what's the difference between a representative democracy and a republic? Would Athens and Rome consider each other's governments functionally the same? Should _we_ consider our form of government as functionally the same as theirs? Words are complicated; the way out of the woods on that is to ask yourself what the context is. I will give different answers to the above questions — and therefore take different kinds of notes — if my notes are intended for teaching 11 year olds from a curriculum given to me by my bosses vs. intended to make sense of a war between two different fantastical governments in one of my novels. How we think about different concepts changes according the lens we view them. Metacognition — being aware of and thinking about how we think — is important, and there aren't many shortcuts beyond practice. Being aware of what point of view you're using to engage with a concept will help those notes be more robust and useful. This helps with organizing notes, too. I think it's helpful to worry less about what category the notes go into, and more about _how they're going to be used._ More critically: **keep in mind what goal the notes are helping you achieve.** A timeline created because some events have dates and we're used to putting information with dates into a timeline isn't terribly valuable. A timeline of legal changes to help you figure out how Roman society evolved? Might be pretty handy — if it's specific enough.