Historical Notetaking

Notetaking is an essential aspect of research and writing. Historians in particular take notes on a grand scale: they process hundreds or thousands of primary sources when writing a book. You may start with index cards and a corkboard. But once you get into a major historical project you may be overwhelmed with sources and connections, and a corkboard will not be enough. Digital tools become crucial at that stage.

I’ve been working on a basic toolkit for historical research and writing with Zotero and Obsidian. I use it to teach honors undergraduate and graduate students. I use a version of this setup to do my own research.

I chose Zotero and Obsidian for digital notetaking because they are free at the entry level, and their paid features are not expensive. Both apps have large and active user communities that support their development so they are not likely to disappear. Finally, their data is portable: Zotero can export all its data as plain-text files, and Obsidian data is basically a folder (called a “vault” in the app) of text files written in markdown, a simple markup language that creates formatted text in a plain-text file. Obsidian features such the local Graph (a map of connections between notes) and Dataview (a plugin that structures the text in my notes so they can be queried like a database) help analyze the information I collect.

I use Zotero to import source metadata and annotate PDFs, and Obsidian to work with notes. A popular way to do that among Obsidian users is to create one “literature note” per source with all annotations. But, as the above chart (based on a research process slide by historian Zachary Schrag) shows, different annotations from the same source actually might belong in different places in your draft. In order to make this work, I split annotations into several research notes that I mark up for analysis and will later sort into groups for writing.

Check out the following:

• My current research note setup - I am working on a starter vault and a guide for this 2.0 setup.
• 01 Notetaking for Historians - an original guide on how to set up a notetaking system with Obsidian and Zotero.
• My original starter Obsidian history vault, available on Github, with all templates and Obsidian plugins described in the above guide already preinstalled in the vault.
• Advice on archival research with digital tools and a video showing how to use Zotero and Obsidian for archival research.
• Notetaking resources for historical research.

Below is a basic recap of my digital notetaking pitch at the AHA Historical Notetaking Workshop in February 2022, with Zachary Schrag, Ian Milligan, and Kate Jewell. It explains why historians need a digital notetaking method matching their intensive qualitative and quantitative analysis of primary sources at scale.