Bulk Indexing & Visualization of Notes?

mfidelman

Registered
Hi Folks,

I find myself with a huge collection of notes - a mix of text, handwriting, and voice - and facing the daunting task of transcribing them & integrating them into the various projects I'm working on.

I wonder if anyone has come across any tools that can bulk process notes - run handwriting/voice recognition, auto-generate tags, automatically group them by tag/keyword-in-context, then present them in a slide-sorter kind of display (kind of like going from a bunch of stickies to stickies grouped on a whiteboard).

Bonus points for importing from Samsung Notes and Voice Notes.

Thanks!

Miles Fidelman
 

Julie Jones

Registered
I use OneNote for all my notes. If they are from paper I use office lens on my phone to take a picture and send to OneNote, It works for whiteboards too and even adjusts for parallax. I send email to OneNote. OneNote automatically indexes the contents of various items pasted or sent to it so you can search everything. For example, if I sent a pdf to onenote or print to onenote that is all searchable. Onenote also has OCR so if a photo has text that I want searchable I can extract it and it will be searchable. I frequently use pen and paper when thinking about a project and scribble drawing, etc. Capturing those and adding them to onenote is easy and I can add them to the project and not lose them.

You can use onenote on all your devices and it will record and transcribe audio.
OneNote can record audio or video/audio combined directly into a page.

"... OneNote can also convert 'speech to text' aka audio transcription or audio search. You need to turn this option on at Options | Audio and Video | Audio Search"

As for tagging and organizing, OneNote doesn't do it automatically, but you can tag things and create custom tags. I don't use tags that much for organizing because search across all my notebooks is so fast.

I send all my incoming to an inbox section of my GTD notebook, if I don't have time to be more specific. But, with office lens, send to onenote, or print to onenote you can choose the destination when you do it.
 

FocusGuy

Registered
Hi Folks,

I find myself with a huge collection of notes - a mix of text, handwriting, and voice - and facing the daunting task of transcribing them & integrating them into the various projects I'm working on.

I wonder if anyone has come across any tools that can bulk process notes - run handwriting/voice recognition, auto-generate tags, automatically group them by tag/keyword-in-context, then present them in a slide-sorter kind of display (kind of like going from a bunch of stickies to stickies grouped on a whiteboard).

Bonus points for importing from Samsung Notes and Voice Notes.

Thanks!

Miles Fidelman
Notes is the complicated part with GTD. I found a solution
I use evernote for all notes I want to keep or consult. I could also use Obsidian witch is an interesting solution for learning stuff.
For the rest I use my bullet journal. I collect note little by little and there are indexed. It is more about journaling and thinking.
 

Gardener

Registered
If I had a lot of notes I cared about, I would put them in Scrivener. It's mainly intended for writing, but it has folders, labels (including bulk labeling), detailed search capability, etc. It can pull in folders full of text files. I'm not sure if it can pull in files in other formats; I've never tried. My understanding is that the data is stored in a human-readable text format--not that you'd WANT to read it, but if something gets corrupted, it's not all forever lost.
 

Oogiem

Registered
I wonder if anyone has come across any tools that can bulk process notes - run handwriting/voice recognition, auto-generate tags, automatically group them by tag/keyword-in-context, then present them in a slide-sorter kind of display
Nope Sorry, but as someone who is dealing with conversion o f over 6000 notes I can say with the authority of experience that doing it manually is Not a Bad Thing. It gives you the chnace to decide something is not worth saving,
 

schmeggahead

Registered
doing it manually is Not a Bad Thing
I find the manual handling of "like kind" items together to develop a rhythm and method works best for me. I look for ways to make what I do process useful when I go back to find it later (where would I want to see this information?).

Processing notes is to put things where you will look for them later (Reference), can act on them in context (Next Action), etc.

For voice recording, I use Drafts on my Mac/iOS systems to automatically translate into text - that is a time saver. Once in text, it is easier to process these voice recordings. I'm unfamiliar with Samsung tools.

As for paper notes, my camera does a pretty good job of scanning hand written text which I find faster than typing. Maybe Samsung has similar support.

If I were faced with a huge backlog of notes, I would examine how I am handling post meeting processing and meeting preparation. I feel that is a part of the time commitment for facilitating (or attending) meetings and my calendar should reflect it.

The backlog session on Connect is an excellent source of strategies to handle processing backlog.

Enjoy the processing, some of it needs to be done anyway.
I like to find a way to make it fun.
Cheers,
Clayton.
 
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