I am in the middle of a doctoral program, and definitions are a big deal. I would like to create a database of definitions that I can add to as I read and research. I will probably end up with at least a couple hundred terms, many of which have contradictory or competing definitions depending on the school of thought. These need to somehow be linked to their original source and author.
For example: I’d like to be able to click somewhere and see a list of terms, and then when I click on the term “culture” for example, I will see 35 different definitions by various anthropologists, each connected to its original source somehow in order to properly cite it later (The source will often be from an article within DT, but not always) .
I have friends who simply create a series of folders with Word documents, but over time that can get cumbersome. I imagine with DT there must be more efficient solutions. Has anyone else faced this kind of situation and come up with a solution within DT?
This sounds like a case for tabular data. Have you looked at using a sheet?
I’m not familiar with DT sheets yet. I’ll take a look.
I wish I could go back to school. It would be a hoot. I can just imagine hoarding knowledge - what the course covered, what I could find on my own, all correlated in DT. I would be that annoying snit who always has sidelights and perspective on the course matter.
DT has a neat feature that might help your lexicography. You can highlight a bunch of documents and groups, right click, and exercise a “create table of contents” option.
That will create just what you would think, either a Markdown or RTF file listing every file and group you highlighted, each entry an x-devonthink-item link.
That means you can drag the table of contents file out of Devonthink and have a document with clickable links back into Devonthink.
A TOC document may not add a lot of value to a DT database, but imagine writing a paper. You’ll have your regular bibliography, and you could tag DT articles as you referenced them. When your paper is done, you could create a TOC from the tag and append the DT-created TOC to your paper as sort of a personal bibliography.
If you deleted the tag in DT, the paper would still have that addendum, listing articles you used when you wrote it.