Can Coda help me with accessing and connecting research and quotes for a book

1

I’m wondering if Coda can help me with a significant research project. I’m exploring Notion, Coda and Curio.

Background
I’m working on a large book project. I have collected a lot of digital research/resources. The material is primarily in one of three formats: PDFs, plain or markdown files, or archived web pages.

Currently all of the documents are in folders/sub-folders in iCloud and accessed through the Finder or through the Files App. They were originally in DEVONThink but I was having syncing issues on iOS so I moved everything out of DT to iCloud.

Currently Used Primary Apps

  • Scrivener–my long form writing app on iPad Pro and the MBP
  • MindNode
  • PDF Expert
  • I’ve downloaded a trial version of Curio but have only tried a few ideas in the app. I don’t have an opinion on this app yet.

Possible Ohter Apps to Use

  • Curio?
  • Coda?
  • Notion?
  • Roam (the subscription price is too high for my tastes)
  • Other?

Requirements

  • Cross platform MBP and iPad syncing in iCloud

My struggle
I may be making this much harder than it needs to be. What I’m trying to do is review each research document related to a particular topic, say team dynamics and cull out the important ideas from the document into a system so I can manipulate the information around and connect it to create final headings and subheadings for each chapter I’m working on.

I’m trying to capture a visual outline or mind map of the ideas/concepts/quotes so I can connect them by copying/pasting/dragging them into an application so that the resulting content does not require reopening the source file. If I use a mind mapping app or free form canvas app like Curio, Coda or Notion, then I only want to type (or cut/paste) a few words with the remainder of the content embedded in the app or branches of a mind map for quick reference.

Ideally I want to be able to export the results into each chapter in Scrivener as headings/subheadings. From there I’ll start the writing. I’m looking for a “bridge app” between the research documents and Scrivener to ensure I capture and connect all of the major ideas, facts, and concepts from the research into appropriate conceptually connected headings/subheadings for each chapter in the book.

Now here is where I may be making this harder than needed. In the “good old days” I had a stack of books and research literature for my dissertation stacked everywhere and I took notes, arranged them in legal pads or note cards, and then started writing. I can certainly do something similar again but I’m hoping there is a better way given all of our new digital tools.

Any best practice advice will be appreciated!

2

Dear @Barrett_Mosbacker,

As you can see from my activity on this community, I am a big Coda enthousiast and it has endless use-cases

As far as I can judge you might consider this tool for various reasons, especially after you mentioned RoamResearch, but found it too expensive.

And use Coda for the end result, you might want to publish some of your work in Coda, what makes it really accessible, user-friendly and interactive for your audience. :raised_hands:

2 Likes
3

Thanks for the kind help, much appreciated. I’ll also check out Obsidian.

4

100% agree with @Jean_Pierre_Traets, Obsidian is my go-to for “high dimensional” ideas like those that go into writing a book or playing with an idea. Then Coda is a great place to present ideas and make them usable. For me it’s proven to be less of a gardening tool (where you explore ideas to see how they grow), and more of an architecture tool (where you build something functional).

5

@Barrett_Mosbacker you should use https://readwise.io/ or https://app.getpolarized.io/ to Sync your highlights from Kindle, Instapaper, Pocket, iBooks, and more .

6

I am too using Obsiadian, mainly because it’s pure Markdown easily usable everywhere, because of tags and folder structure and for single and bidirectional linking, that you could also have in Coda in someway but it requires a lot of work under the hood. The suggestions to link together something you could have missed it’s unvaluable for me.

But the real deal it’s the graph, the way you can litteraly see and navigate through some kind of external brain to really,

I wonder if @maria and @BenLee are using it or if there is some plan about this, as Coda is becoming more and more into my life and have make a superhuman regarding how I deal with my world crafting docs after docs for any use I can imagine.

Maybe they are also working on Personal Knowledge Management in CODA. Finger crossed!

7

What a cool looking tool! And I’m so excited about your book use case. I personally don’t use knowledge management tools beyond Coda because they don’t quite work for my brain. I highly recommend posting your request here to surface it to our product team.

8

Done! if you check in the use case field you will find a link of a picture of how contents are connected on an interactive map @maria

9

Hi Barrett! Have you solved this?

I’ve run into similar issues, with different use cases. I have piles of web links, PDFs (often research papers), contacts, to do items, notes, etc…. I have been using coda for some time and find it useful for some of this, but not a complete solution. Ditto for a number of the tools mentioned.

Two tools you may check out:

  • LiquidText - this allows for multi-document PDF annotation and linking into external documents. File management leaves something to be desired, but if you want a store of linked PDFs, this is a good one
  • Typora - this is the cleanest markdown editor that I have found, and easy(ish) to adjust styles to your viewing preferences

I also use obsidian. It adds a lot in linking markdown documents together and automations. The editor itself is not as good as typora in my opinion. Thought the biggest issues with obsidian for me are pdf handling and markdown tables. PDFs are second tier citizens in obsidian. What this means is that you find them, link to them, and view them, but you cannot tag them or easily search for them (that I have found), even using automation plug ins such as dataview. You can get around this by having a companion markdown note for each PDF. Not terrible, but it creates a lot of work. Tables are the other issue. If you play around with coda tables and see what you can do with essentially on-the-fly relational database, you will never want to see another markdown table again. Yes, markdown can give you a small set of tabular data quickly, but that is about it… and don’t get me started on editing markdown tables…

Coda’s superpower is easy to create relational databases on the fly- you can have a table of books, another of quotes that is linked to the books, notes, etc and filter, combine, and pivot these on the fly. It is quite useful. Where it may fall down for your use case is 1) document management, and 2) data entry. For my use case at least, I would like to have PDF documents, markdown documents, web links, and custom data fields such as contacts all linkable in various ways, and be able to add and organized documents and information in the most streamlined way possible.

Ideally, I could use email or file operations to get documents into the system, tags to organize them, and tables to find them. Bookmarks I would ideally add with one click across platforms, or just hook cleanly into pinboard which does this already. Playing nicely with LiquidText would also help a lot. As would being able to plug into my obsidian vault directly, which is on icloud. Unfortunately, coda does not have a way to do any of this cleanly that I am aware of, and definitely not at scale. Maybe one day?

10

Anyone who wants to write an academic paper should check out Citavi. It’s specificially designed for this purpose. The core function is managing sources and citations, but it’s features cover the whole process from gathering literature to managing knowledge to writing the paper.

When uploading a PDF, the software scans large library databases and autofills metadata like title, authors, publisher, publishing year, tags and so on. The build-in PDF viewer lets you mark text and screenshot areas to create a citation you can then assign to (sub-)chapters, tags and organizational groups. Via the word- or LaTeX-plugin, you can insert the citation into your paper, source and page references are created automatically in any required citation style as well as the entry in your bibliography. In the same way, it lets you add your own thougths/notes into the structure.

Of course you will sometimes miss the freedom of restructuring the databases like you can in Coda, especially when it comes to task management, but Citavis versatile chapter/tags/group system as well as it’s powerful filter function cover most of your needs for your academic work, even as a data structure perfectionist.

11

Thanks. Citavi looks pretty cool. I was not aware of it, though have played with sciwheel, paper pile, mendeley, zotero. Citavi looks like it is more capable. The ability to capture web pages (if it works well) and turn them into references, may be particularly differentiated in regards to Barrett’s original question. Do you know how well this works, or how well it plays with text files such as markdown?

For my personal workflow, citation management is less important, and more important is seamless capture across a wide array of inputs, filtering across many different types of data, and the flexibility to use the thing where I am at, e.g. ipad and pen for paper comments. ie. get the sources into a database, then find the documents / data quickly. Also, speed in switching between contexts and keeping me on task when I am in a deep focus mode. I have found great tools for pieces of this, but not one solution that stitches them together, or is good enough across the board to ditch the purpose built tools. Still looking for folks who have solved this!