Hello,
Like kaibo, this is also my first post. I am also working on qualitative academic research and have only recently become a user of DevonThink for this.
I’m posting my question to this thread because I think it follows on from the integration question and the visual thinking problem (also, I would love to have the links for the @beck and @kseggleton geekery you refer to up top.)
I do ethnographic style research, which results in a lot of pictures, sound and video, plus fieldnotes that are in very poor handwriting with sketches & other material that doesn’t OCR well. For me, rather than searchable text-based associations, I need to integrate metadata (especially the date/geolocation of a photo taken) and tags that I make as codes which ideally would be intra-file tags/links, so I could mark a region on a photo or PDF. For example, I have handwritten fieldnotes in PDF that correspond to a photo taken at the same time: it would be amazing to be able to link to the photo as a thumbnail embedded in the fieldnotes pdf; or to mark a region on a photo, a section of video, or a region in a fieldnotes PDF to tag/code, so I could review a tag collection later as its own document. It would be magical if that document could order chronologically based on metadata.
This is along the lines of what some CAQDAS software does (e.g. Atlas.TI or Trophy with tagging photo regions) but there are always caveats. As far as I can tell, I can’t tag internally on PDFs (in DT or in Atlas.TI) and, what DT offers especially is tags that are readable elsewhere (not so with Atlas.TI, without some manipulation as I understand). In any case, I think DT has more potential.
I’ve been looking through various posts here (especially here) and trying to experiment with DT to see how this might work. This thread makes me wonder if Tinderbox or Curio might be the shell layer through which I can work with the raw files in DT. Initially to me, it sounds like Curio might be a possibility, but I’m having some new-app-fatigue - I’ve tried Tagspaces, Eagle filer, and others before deciding to go with DT. Also, my ‘fiddling’ abilities are limited: I’ve gotten as far as trying out Markdown as a way to try to build this layer as a DT document, but didn’t get very far before semi-abandoning that route. I’m not afraid of coding but I have a limited amount of time to put into learning a system.
If anyone has suggestions or insight related to this, i would greatly appreciate it.
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