Hi everyone! I have a personal interest in U.S. religious history. While I’ve read many books regarding it that summarize a lot of the source material for you, I’m ready to start investing time in collecting and organizing the source material myself to deepen my understanding and knowledge of events.
I’m wondering how you all manage so many documents yourselves. I’m a software developer, so I imagine my solution would be some kind of document indexing software in which you could upload a file or provide a URL, write notes on it, tag the document with keywords that help you search for it later, that sort of thing.
Is there a name for this kind of software? I imagine something of the sort exists. If you guys use some sort of software yourselves, what do you use and what would you recommend for me?
Thanks for the help!
So there are very few good options regarding this sort of thing currently. I occasionally survey my peers to find out what they do (I am a database programmer and have my own "homemade" solution to this but it is very specific to my own modes of research and not at all ready for public use). The answers in the last few years have been:
No dedicated software. Which is to say, they use the file system to organize the original files (JPGs or PDFs) and then take notes on them in Word and then just keep track of those notes.
Citation software. Things like Zotero can be used for this if your files are each independent (e.g., one PDF per file), though it's a lot of work to get a lot of documents into them. It's not really the ideal "use case" of this kind of software, but it can be used this way. The only software I know of that attempts to help with research photographs is Tropy. I haven't used it much.
Home-made solutions. Some people come up with their own idiosyncratic solutions to this, which can range from Excel hacks to custom-made programs. Requires a lot of up-front time investment and is very hard to migrate to any other system.
There is not a huge market for historians and the management of historical documents. It is not helped by the fact that historians are pretty idiosyncratic and personal in their research styles (which is a feature, not a bug); mapping the flexibility of that onto software is tricky, especially given that there's practically no money to be made in it.