“Sorry to disappoint.”
No problem. My situation is similar. I bought my first Mac in 1992 and then there were newsgroups and email lists available about almost everything. Now they seem to have all disappeared. When I asked my Internet Service Provider about newsgroups the salesperson didn’t know what I was talking about. He had never even heard the word!
Thank you very much for the link to the related discussion thread about academic research.
“all my research is in DT”
What happens when you have finished a project, i.e. when you don’t need a particular research material anymore? Do you then remove it from DT? Or do you just keep it in DT?
With this approach I’m afraid I would soon run out of space. My MacBook Pro has 1 TB internal disk, and my external disk, where I keep my research material, is 4 TB, and it’s already getting tight, I have only got 51 GB left.
“I still find effective research on verse a challenge”
It certainly is. For my personal needs only, I was thinking about creating a FileMaker Pro database for categorizing poems according to literary motives. Nothing spectacular, just a private working tool to help me find similar poems. Think of “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, for example. “The poem explores the fate of history and the ravages of time: even the greatest men and the empires they forge are impermanent, their legacies fated to decay into oblivion.” (Wikipedia)
I have read innumerable poems with similar motives, but when it comes to tell you the titles and the authors of these poems I’m afraid I can’t remember any of them. I think a database with the keywords
life is transient; impermanence (or something like that)
would be helpful for me. Nothing of great scholarly value, just a toy to play with.
For my writing projects, when I am done and do not need the files in DEVONthink anymore, i am loathe to delete. So, I create a new database named as the project. Move all the applicable files into that new database. Then create an archive backup (using the DEVONthink menu command) and put that file on my NAS in the archive folder. In the old days I would write the file to a CD or DVD. Then delete that database just created.
Saves clogging up my computers.
Storage is cheap - especially compared with the work to compile such data.
Get a bigger external drive! Particularly if you are wiling to go with an HDD rather than SSD, pricing is trivial.
I won’t hijack this thread, but when setting up your workflow my advice is: as well as asking how people in your own field do things, do check out what other fields are doing too.
E.g. I’ve just read this thread and I’m a scientist and don’t even know what most of you are talking about 
At its most basic we knowledge workers all have the same problems:
I assume (perhaps erroneously) that your quest to track whatever it is you track through your literature is not “technically” any different to my quest to track my key themes through my literature (though of course scientific papers are very different to medieval books!).
I actually find the lawyers the most helpful for DT scenarios. They talk a lot and always have interesting setups, and as a vocation they handle A LOT of paper and have to recall and retrieve a huge amount of detail.
Anyway, I import everything into DT nowadays, I don’t store any research outside it. From your comments here it seems you’d find replicants valuable, as you could have different groups for different things, e.g. groups for French literature, French authors, Voltaire, etc. And your files could be in all of them. Or you just have lots of tags if you prefer it that way. (I don’t use tags like that but of course many do. I use group to collect my files.)
For research, read the section in the manual on how to use DT with Boolean search operators if you’re not familiar. It is life-changing.
“Get a bigger external drive!”
Seems we have some misunderstanding here. Since I keep the resource material on an external disk and use indexing to get it into DT, I’ll never run out of space because I can always get a bigger external drive. However, if I do it like @SebMacV does, that is, have all resources permanently in DT on the internal drive, I will certainly run out of space sooner or later.
My suggestion is neither of those.
I think other than exceptional situations by someone extremely aware of the caveats, indexing has considerable risk of losing data. That is particularly so if you are archiving/moving data.
My suggestion instead is to create additional “archive” DT3 database(s), import (rather than index) the data there, and then store those archival DT3 databases on an external drive of whatever size is needed.
I know, I purposely didn’t mention that because that’s a subscription model with yearly payments. Yucky…
“My suggestion instead is to create additional “archive” DT3 database(s), import (rather than index) the data there, and then store those archival DT3 databases on an external drive of whatever size is needed.”
Are you suggesting to store the databases permanently on an external disk?
If I understand you right, you are suggesting
If this is what you mean, why not simply
(1) create the new database via File > New Database… directly on my external disk
(2) Import the data which are on the external disk directly into the new database
That is exactly what I am suggesting
In an earlier response to @DCBerk
I said that if you (1) aren’t using MS Word, LibreOffice or GoogleDocs and are (2) not a LaTeX user, you have no other choice than buying Bookends [which in itself is an excellent choice.]
I forgot to mention synopsis, a program by Markus Krajewski in Switzerland which was specially written for academics. It’s based on Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten technic, and I think it’s worth that every Mac academic should at least have heard of it.
I tried it out a few years ago; it looked quite promising, but I had already chosen Bookends as my reference manager at that time so that my test was only very superficial.
What makes the program particularly interesting is that it makes similar claims as DEVONthink:
“Synapsen is a digital card index or reference organizer (developed since 1996) […] in contrast to normal literature management software, synapsen offers a very distinct advantage: with catchwords entered by the user, the program connects individual cards automatically and creates not only a network of cards whose relation to each other might have been forgotten, but also creates completely unexpected connections and relations between individual entries. synapsen is therefore not only for electronic literature management, but also a helping hand when writing scientific texts, which participates in communication with the author in order to augment lines of argumentation and the generation of ideas.”
It’s written in Java, and full license cost 89 US$.
About Synapsen, see here: http://www.verzetteln.de/synapsen/about/
That looks interesting - I will check that out. Thanks.
Re Mellel and StoryPoint. I was aware of that feature, but don’t use it because I primarily write in Scrivener, and can insert non-printing annotations between lines, which could be dates, among other things. Some of the dates I keep in Aeon are not things that appear in my story, but which have an impact on the world the characters live in, e.g. the start of a war, a natural disaster, publication of a book a character might read, a significant historical figure’s death; you get the idea. It’s easy enough to look up something there, should I need to.
Synapsen is interesting but more complex than I need, given I have Zotero for Mac and DTPro. It reminds me of Mitch Kapor’s Agenda, which I used and really, really liked; most unfortunate that app was allowed to die – it was way ahead of it’s time and very elegant
What sort of materials do you store?
In my usage, though I feared I’d run out of space at some point, this hasn’t yet happened. When my employer bought me a brand-new MBP M1 Pro recently, the only disappointment was that the single option on the table was the stock 512GB storage model. But in fact I’m still fine with this. (I’m planning on an external SSD in a while, for archival purposes, but this would be a nice-to-have, not essential at this stage).
Your mileage will vary but my needs aren’t enormous - much humanities research is text based and as such, storage needs are relatively small. I organise my research differently anyway perhaps – I have one major ‘Research’ database, containing a large ‘Library’ group for primary and secondary literatures (PDFs largely); a single DB for images (largely digitised manuscripts and on on); and some smaller DB for discrete projects which have outgrown their ‘group’ status. The majority of ‘projects’ (that tend to relate to outputs, publications such as books, articles, chapters, and so on) are negligible in terms of storage needs (a pile of md files for planning; a pile of drafts as Scrivener and Word documents; some associated stuff like contracts). I pull in what resources I need for each project from the central library and images databases via smart groups (via tags). or replicants, or via links to external databases or datasources.
In my world, I have never thought ‘I won’t need these primary resources again’. I tend to think ‘I won’t look at these for a while now’, but I see my research library as one whole that will slowly grow until I pop my clogs. A large portion of the material gets comparatively little use, but the point of a personally crafted collection and DTs searching power is finding things you’d never anticipated just when you need them!
Anyway – good luck with the FM database. I am conducting a similar-ish project at present (indexing verse, including some topic/subject indexing, which is a great deal harder than I’d thought). I’m using Airtables at present, but once the project will need to scale up, I’ll abandon it for a custom built DB solution (not DT).
This is incorrect.
That would create an optimized, compressed file of the database in its current state. It’sw a secondary backup mechanism.
File > New Database is how you create a new database.
“I see my research library as one whole that will slowly grow until I pop my clogs”
Nicely said. This is exactly my position too. I’m mostly interested in the social and political aspects of literature. Therefore my “resource material” is taken from social and political history, as well as philosophy, sociology, political philosophy, psychology and anthropology. All these subjects are of interest to me. I guess the central gravitational point here could be labeled as “history of ideas” or simply “cultural studies”. That should answer your question “What sort of materials do you store?”
I have begun to clean up my external drive, the one I keep plugged in all the time. There is some stuff there that should be somewhere else (music, old software…) After weeding that out I’m confident I will have enough space to run a large DT database on that disk, provided that it is advisable and can be done without the risk of making DT slow.
Good luck for the verse project. It would be nice to hear more about it when you have successfully set up the final framework.
Thank you for chiming in.
I’m planing to store my DT databases on my external drive. Why? Because then I wouldn’t need to worry about not having enough disk space one day. Is this a good idea? Any drawbacks?
My current DT databases are stored in the Documents folder on my internal drive. Now my question is this: couldn’t I just copy them by drag and drop onto my large external drive? Then I could just run them from the external drive.
One thing should be mentioned, though. In my current databases many files were indexed (not imported). If I now just copy the databases from the internal to the external disk, could that perhaps be a problem for DT, perhaps not being able to find them?
Or should I simply start from scratch and use File > New Database and save it on the external disk? Then drag the folders I need from the Finder into DT. That wouldn’t take much time, I suppose.
Mellel is great, but the story points feature needs to evolve. The remarks can’t have more than one paragraph and you can’t resize the remarks window. When you go to a story point, you can see the list of characters and locations related to the story point but you can’t readily navigate to them.
I hope the feature evolves. In the meantime, I use Devonthink like a Scrivener Research folder on steroids and the navigation pane in Mellel like Scrivener’s Draft Binder.