Reading around this subreddit has left me wondering how people manage to remember historiography and general bits of obscure knowledge from books and other sources they read. There are some super knowledgeable folk on here and I'm curious how they do it. Is it a case of having a great memory, or how do you collate all your information? I read books on subjects and I'd love to be able to do more with what I know, though I realise also that I'm more an armchair observer at the moment than anything else.
Basically, what I'm asking is how best to log information from various sources that I want to be able to refer to in future and potentially use to help contribute here; thank you for any input.
Basically I write articles, papers, essays and other texts on almost everything that catches my interest, no matter if I use it for something (publishing, courses etc.) or not, and have it saved on my computer for future reference. Whenever I see a question on here that relates to my area, I might not have every detail memorized, but I probably have something written on it, so I look it up and then it all comes back to me. Usually though, just writing down helps me remember stuff. I sometimes even make notes when watching documentaries. Even if I never look at them it has helped me store the information.
I make digital notes on whatever I am reading. Largely it is just typed in quotes from print sources (or copy/paste from digital ones) that I know I want to use later. This started out as notepad documents, but now I use Scrivener. Its research tab has made my life writing answers here a ton easier. Also, taking the time to create a document about the source makes me consider what the author is saying and makes the arguments more concrete in my mind.
The rest is just a decent memory for such things and passion/obsession.
I keep all my information in Zotero. You can create categories (so for example, I have a New France category, France in the Caribbean, etc) for different fields. In each category you can either drag a pdf (say, of an article or ebook) or enter an ISBN number and the book and all of its info stays there. You get to keep and save notes for every item you have cataloged. I recommend it to anyone interested in history (or those in other academic disciplines who need to organize their research). https://www.zotero.org/
All the reading I do for my PhD is in typed up notes and saved under the book title in endnote. I also save the documents with the author, title and some key words so I can do a simple search in my computer for it. I'm doing a historiography for my PhD, which is why I manage to remember things for that, but most of the time I need a recap and can't remember it off the top of my head.
But with many things I tend to be able to remember the author and topic enough to give a vague answer (not just on here, but when people find out you are a historian they ask you all sorts of ridiculous questions and expect you to be an expert in all areas of history!), and I look at my notes for a more detailed answer. For some weird reason as well I can remember numbers really easily, so I can remember dates of things, but then it turns against me because I can remember the dates for a certain King or Queen but not their name!
After every book I read, I write a short precis -- roughly 300 words on what the general subject is, the basic argument, engagement with similar work, etc. I started this in grad school and have a very large 'catalog' now. It's proven useful many times.
(Hint --> it was especially useful in preparing for exams.)
You save all your footnotes/endnotes in a huge google docs folder when you're done and then do Ctrl + F when you want to remember something.