Quote:
Originally Posted by thibaulthalpern
Yes. The best way to understand something we read and to retain information is to interact with the text rather than just passively move eye from line to line to line. You can do the latter when reading for leisure but it's not a very skillful way of reading when you need to retain information and/or when you are working out the meanings and contradictions of an argument.
When reading an article (or book) for example, it's helpful to mark areas of the book where the main arguments appears, where you have doubts about something being explained, where a piece of information is useful for your study (or in my case, research, since I'm a scholar). It's also helpful to mark areas where you don't understand but think is important but in the interest of getting the larger picture you will return to that difficult passage later.
These are all ways of interacting with the text that move us beyond just eye glossing from line to line to line. Do the companies or people who create these digital technologies understand this at all? This is really rather basic and fundamental reading skills!
|
Excellent point. I am a doctoral student, so I understand exactly what you mean. The best option which works very well for me is a Tablet PC (or UMPC) + Acrobat PRO + Endnote. Acrobat is ridiculously expensive, so there are other cheaper options, like Nitro and Foxit Readers; their only drawback, compared to Acrobat, is that they do not have OCR (Optical Character Recognition) option, which creates an extra layer beneath the scanned picture with the actual text, which can be highlighted, search and commented. But, there must be university computers with Acrobat PRO, so you can just OCR your files there (this needs to be done only once). OCR is not perfect, but so far it's been working perfectly fine for my purposes.
Let me know if anything above stated needs elaboration.