Trying to get away from being glued to the digital screen for everything (work and pleasure), I switch to reading one of the many books lying around untouched for ages.
I come across words that I either recognise but don't remember their precise meanings, or new ones. Instead of going to my phone or laptop to look up each one as and when they crop up, I make a list on a strip of paper I use as a bookmark, for me to search later in one go. For the context in case I forget, I note down the page number for returning to.
This is something I've learned from a retired SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) academic back in the 1990s, Russell Jones, when I was working with him on a University of Leiden loanwords project. (It was the Loanwords in Indonesian / Malay in the series: [from googling] Indonesian / Malay Loanwords: Research on Chinese and Dutch loanwords in Indonesian/Malay, curated by Russell Jones.)
Russell Jones kept beavering away at research after his official retirement from SOAS in 1984. I'm honoured to have worked with him on the Indonesian / Malay Loanwords project, learning a lot in the process, amongst which is this good practice of noting down the source of something one has seen that one might want to go back to later, either for clarification or for fetching more of the surrounding text to use as a quote.
Russell Jones's system is: dividing a page into nine sections, assigning a to i to each one (consisting of a couple of lines or so). For example, if there was a word or sentence in the middle of page 98 that was of interest, he'd write down "p.98.e". Later, if he wanted to go back to read more context for that word or sentence, he'd be able to zoom straight into p.98, and the middle of that page, since e is the middle of a to i.
This is too refined a system for me, so I've adapted it to just five sections: a to e, with c being the middle. It's much easier for me, and good enough to get me close to the word or sentence.
(London, 1990s to the present)
Interesting system! The story also brings back some nostalgia for the days when computers and the internet did not rule our life. Looking up titles in a card catalog at the library, jotting down notes with pencil and paper...something is definitely lost.
ReplyDeleteAbout the system of dividing the page into 9 sections: when reviewing a mathematical papers one often needs to be more detailed than that because every line counts. So the system is to assign a positive number to a line if counted from the top of the page, and a negative number if counted from the bottom. So page 35, -8 would mean the 8th line of page 35 counted from the bottom.
The system for reference later when reviewing maths papers has to be very detailed indeed, because (as you said) every line counts. This must mean that a lot of time, if not more than the review work itself, is taken up just jotting down the reference page/section alone! Ah, blog to come!
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