Digital Note-Taking for Writing

Abstract

Note-taking is prevalent in academia—it is the basis of scholarly work, i.e. searching for information, collecting and reading literature, writing and collaborating, referred to as a “primitive” that assists these information activities (e.g., Palmer, C. L., Teffeau, L. C., & Pirmann, C. M. (2009). Scholarly information practices in the online environment: Themes from the literature and implications for library service development. OCLC Research. https://accesson.kisti.re.kr/upload2/i_report/1239602399570.pdf). Researchers and higher education students take notes throughout the inquiry cycle, i.e. while designing research, collecting data, analysing data, and writing the report. In addition, with written assignments being a considerable part of student academic work, notes are taken in the writing process, from generating ideas for writing tasks, through text planning and drafting to its editing. As this process may be challenging, digital note-taking has the potential to facilitate writing in academic contexts (Matysek, A., & Tomaszczyk, J. (2020). Digital wisdom in research work. Zagadnienia Informacji Naukowej—Studia Informacyjne, 58(2A(116A)), 98–113. https://doi.org/10.36702/zin.705). Yet, despite the availability of literature concerning formal requirements of writing, such as style, structure, referencing, etc., relatively little literature deals with the note-taking activity that assists academic writing, and even less with digital note-taking. In order to bridge this gap, this chapter focuses on the note-taking activity and shows how digital tools can support note takers in the academic writing context.