[meta] Historians, how do you read, record, and reference such large amounts of reading?

by 6dogsandcounting

I'm a junior in a social science that requires a lot of reading, and I've just entered the stage in my education where there's officially too much for me to be able to keep it all in my head, but at the same time too much for me to take notes on in the way I used to.

Thinking about this recently, I realized that this must be totally dwarfed by the amount of reading required of any professional (or even amateur) historian on a daily basis.

So my question - how do you do it? How do you keep yourself focused, make sure you actually learn from things you read, and organize it so that you can reference it weeks or months later?

So every historian has there own methods for doing this. I do mine in a variety of ways. I use color coated stickies for every book I read. I highlight the hell out of books that I read, probably 30+ highlights per book. Each highlight pertains to one of 5 colors, which tells me why I highlighted it. If I need more details stuff about a highlight or want to remember what I was reading, I'll put a number on the sticky and then write down my thoughts in my research notes (I use Microsoft OneNote). This is super helpful since I'll use these notes a ton during the writing process.

I also don't read every book. Most Grad students, professors, and historians do this as well. There's tricks to knowing how you can get through a book quickly. First, I'll read academic book reviews and read them in order of academic prestige. The American Historical Review and The William and Mary Quarterly (this is arguably the most well-respected journal in my academic field) at the top. These will tell me what other historians think and will give me a good summary before jumping into the book. They'll often cite helpful page numbers or important parts or valid critiques. When I read a book, I'll read the entire introduction, often times being the most significant part of the book for providing direction of what I need to get out of the book. If I'm not reading entire chapters, I'll read the intro chapter or two, and then the first sentence of every paragraph. This is helpful since academic books are designed to have topic sentences that provide a wealth of info and they inform me about whether or not I should read the rest.

The focus part is harder. For me, I make sure that I take breaks, even short breaks when needed. When I was working on my thesis, there were days where I was spending 12 hours or more reading, so in the middle of that, I would have lunch and play an hour of video games just to unwind. I also kept a reading chart for myself, outlining what books I should read and I'd always make it based off of how engaging the authors were to make sure I didn't read too many boring books back to back.

Anyways, hope this answers your question. Let me know if you have follow ups.