“Restructuring” notes and documents – aka incremental formalization – can be a very effective learning exercise. Perhaps the most important aspect of working with notes. As you work with prior notes, form new notes from the ideas or data in them, or summarize them, or create linkage between them, or even discard irrelevant ones, you are headed down the path of emergence and discovery. That is what makes note taking exciting, regardless of how you go about it.
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Really good points there.
A point to consider here—with no ‘correct’ answer—is it may help to keep those ‘old’ notes if only for provenance reasons. In such a case you can still shunt the old notes off to a different part of the doc, e.g. not your current map/view. Also for such old notes you might want to ensure they aren’t running rules/edicts. Perhaps apply a new/different template so they also get excluded from queries you actually intend to run against newer notes.
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Just a quick update: After considering the various suggestions made (thanks @mwra and others for these) I’ve decided that, rather than structuring the document as notionally accommodating the whole of Early Modern Philosophy, I would make the projects on which I’m currently working the primary focus. I have two recent conference papers that I’m looking to expand into journal articles, as well as an ongoing translation project. The three projects now have their own dedicated containers which occupy a prominent position in the opening map view. I’ve just started moving all subsidiary notes (and child containers) into these top-level containers. For shared notes I’ll use aliases. A further intention is to expand use of prototypes and user attributes. The prospect of a rejuvenated document with enhanced functionality is a great motivation, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how it works out.
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Indeed, I keep old notes because I often find they mean different things to me at different times of consultation because my thinking has invariably changed. Sometimes I see things in my notes I had not seen before, other times I am reminded of how I used to see things and that such a perspective once seemed natural.
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Zettelkasten Note taking system is exellent, I like notion for notes because I can keep allof my research and notes in one place.
But different note taking apps are suitable for different workflow, such as google keep, which is simple, convenient and work across devices (phone, laptop, tablet, etc )
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