I'm a visual learner, unfortunately, and I'm trying to do a bit of research of a long era and keep track of major and minor events that had a direct or indirect impact, as well as major players. I'm struggling to keep track of it due to aforementioned visual learning. Does anyone have any methods or tools they use while studying or researching they'd recommend, especially if they tend to benefit from visually interesting study methods like myself?
People have their own ways of organizing information-- what works for me won't necessarily work for you, but anyway:
Technique #1: Write practice answers with footnotes. The mere act of typing something up with sources tends to imprint it in memory differently. That's part of why I usually list my sources when I write an answer here. Part of it is for the reader, part of it is for me, helps me remember the sources that connect to the topics.
Technique #2 Back in the Dark Ages before EndNote and Zotero, history (and other) grad students used to walk around campus with grey metal boxes containing their collection of notecards on which they'd laboriously copied out bits of primary sources, and other relevant details. It was how people organized dissertation note, quite often-- and also occasionally prepared for oral examinations. It was a royal pain, but it did have the virtue that you were handling a physical item associated with a particular idea; a quotation from a primary source, a battle with a date on it and so on. [and you felt nothing but pity at the occasional flyers posted by some desperate Gollum of a student who'd lost their notecards and begged of passersby if they'd seen their precious]
This lead to a great familiarity with sources (so long as you had a notecard on it), as one ran through practice questions for oral examinations, you might string together three or four of these notecards as part of your "how did gold from the Americas affect the finances and policies of Spain, and subsequent Spanish economic development?" answer
For me at least, historical knowledge is a gestalt, a network of facts that are linked by explanatory power, and that notecard style of organization worked well.
So what I'd say for someone who's visually oriented is to put each event and person on a card, like a grad student in 1981.
You can buy blank decks cheaply online (used by game creators), and printable stickable labels as well. Shuffle the deck and start creating logical piles of connected events. So the First Defenestration of Prague [1419] is connected to the Hussite Wars, HRE Sigismund, the Taborites and the Ultraqusts. The Second Defenestration [1618] (which is what people are usually referring to) is connected to the Battle of White Mountain and is the spark for the Thirty Years War. If those are all just a blur of text on your screen, it can be hard to keep them straight. Sort them out of a pack of cards, and you have a more tactile instantiation to hang your node map on.
Following up on that question: I need to create timelines to see the intersection of several 19th centuries character, and consider them in the context of national events. Ideally I would like different colors for each character and another one for national events. Does anyone have a a recommendation?