I’ve been using DT & DA for a few years now, always increasing my usage and learning new things. I’ve recently reached a point where things seem to have clicked a bit and I feel like I’ve leveled up my usage in a big way. I thought I’d share…
My research process involves reading LOTS of internet discussion forums and synthesizing the information I find. Specifically, it looks like:
- Find discussion forums
- Identify key words
- Search for threads
- Select threads to study in detail later
- Study the threads in detail
DT and DA is a killer combo for this. Some details:
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Find discussion forums - no surprise here that DA is awesome. Do a deep web search for the kind of forums you want, delete anything that doesn’t look good, add bookmarks to DEVONthink.
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Identify key words - DA and DT are both helpful here. DA with its topic map, and DT with its concordance.
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Search for threads - With a list of discussion forums, and a list of keywords, DA becomes a powerhouse. Create a plugin for each discussion forum, and then just do searches with keywords. My search set filters out previously found results so I’m not constantly looking at the same things. I add these results as bookmarks to a different database… the first database is just for generating keywords. This database is for threads I think may actually have useful information.
At this point, DA and DT is already a winning combination. But here’s the part that really blows my mind…
- Select threads to study in detail later - with a list of threads identified, you can load them back into DEVONagent as a search set. Just select your bookmarks, copy, and paste into the Sites tab of a new search set. DA will automatically set them to “crawl”. Now do your search (and secondary search!!) and DA will pull down the latest versions of them automatically.
IN-FREAKING-SANE
Now all that’s left to do is read the relevant threads and make sense of them… DEVONtech can’t do all the work 
I am LOVING the bookmarks in DB and reloading them into DA approach. I used to have TONS of documents in my databases collected from the web… and it just felt cluttered and not very high quality. Plus it takes up a lot of space. But by capturing bookmarks in DT, and then gradually refining the list using DA, I can zoom in on exactly the stuff I’m looking for. It’s simply incredible.
