Celebrating the Index Card

23 October 2007 at 2:54 pm Peter G. Klein 2 comments

| Peter Klein |

Old-timers like me learned to write research papers by taking notes on index cards, spreading them out on a table, and placing them in a coherent sequence. Nowadays people just open up Word (or, for geekier types, $\LaTeX$ ) and start typing. Of course, ex ante preparation and ex post revision are substitutes and, as the cost of the latter has fallen, investment in the former has dropped sharply. The net effect on quality — well, let’s just say the jury is out.

One of my favorite tech blogs, Web Worker Daily, which features retro-analog stuff like the Hipster PDA, offers this list of things you can do with an index card. I’ve tried many of these (not #7 and #13) and have found them quite effective.

I guess you could use something like ndxCards, but would it be as much fun?

Entry filed under: - Klein -, Ephemera.

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2 Comments Add your own

1. Daniel J. D'Amico | 26 October 2007 at 4:53 pm

scrivener for mac users
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html
2. Ambika | 28 October 2007 at 8:51 pm

I use ndxCards and it’s a great way to work with the index card format and get around a lot of the limitations of paper note cards. I don’t have to worry about things like losing cards or ways of cross-filing. Plus, it’s a great way of getting into the practice of using index cards if you never had the foundation of using paper note cards. ndxCards works for research, business or even personal things like recipes and phone messages. It’s great!