DevonThink was designed to be a solution to the problem of managing the data we collect, and its ultimate solution is to 'go paperless': every scrap of your research can be transformed into bytes and deposited into the database, to be retrieved with mere keystrokes.
The beauty (and terror) of DevonThink is that opening a new database is like staring into a slate grey abyss: DevonThink allows you to fashion pretty much any folder structure you like, to impose any order you wish upon your data universe. There are thus as many database configurations as there are people in the world: each one a unique reflection of the brain which produced it. What I found most helpful when getting started was to look at as many examples of how others had used DevonThink that I could find. I therefore offer the following as just one example of how DevonThink can be used for history research. Given limited space, I can only touch on three of the many useful features of DevonThink: flexible filing, smart groups, and textual concordance. An expanded version of this essay is available on my blog (the URL for which is appended below).ĭevonThink's flexible filing structure is one of its biggest attractions for me: it allows you to create any root file structure you wish, beginning with the most basic unit, a "group". The bulk of material in my PhD database is contained in two groups: primary material ("Archives") and secondary material ("Library"). In my "Archives" group, my substructures usually mimic those of the archives I visited. I allocate one group for each physical repository I consulted (e.g. "British Library", "The National Archives, UK"), and within that, one group per source I consulted from that repository.
Devonthink to go 2 archive#
With archives, I usually replicate the filing structure of the archive itself, as this helps with citation later on. In my "Library" group, I have a group per book or article, listed by author/date of publication. #How to use devonthink to go archive#Įach seminar, interview, book, journal and archive file thus has a group of its own everything I know about or learn from that source, and frequently the source itself in PDF, JPG or DOC form, is in there.ĭevonThink also has, alongside its normal groups, the ability to create "Smart Groups", which automatically collate data from anywhere in the database matching a given set of boolean conditions. One way in which I use smart groups is to auto-sequence my archival data chronologically. As a modern historian, almost all my primary data is time-specific down to the day or month, so I got into the habit of naming my files according to a strict YYYY.MM.DD format. This enabled me to create a collection of smart groups-one for each year, each of which automatically contains all source documents and notes pertaining to that year. This is a simple enough matter of conditionals (e.g. 'For the smart group called "1945", include all files whose title includes the string "1945"'). So for example, in Figure 2, the file highlighted green is a letter to the British colonial office dated. This file was automatically included in my 1948 smart group because it matches the specified conditional. And because all files are named according to the same format, with the date first, I can sort them alphabetically and get a list of documents in ascending chronological order over the course of a single year.
Perhaps the most unique feature of DevonThink is textual concordance.
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