Good practices: 04 (Locating the source when researching)

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)