How I use Wiki-Links and Aliases in DEVONthink to read Aristotle
Following a friend's advice over at the DT Forum, I decided to write a little bit about how I use wiki-links and aliases since it could perhaps inspire new ideas in other users of this tool. I intend to write something more through some other time, but for now, here is a gist of it.
In my PhD work, I deal all the time with Ancient Greek texts — most of them by Aristotle. Aristotle’s thinking is both deep and diverse; at times also very difficult. Usually you need to get a grip on some of the main concepts he builds his thinking around before it all starts to make sense. To help me in this job, I try to maintain a glossary that I am always updating and improving. For each main concept, I have a separate markdown file with a definition, some references from the corpus where this concept is discussed and perhaps even a transcription from the dictionary entry of the term.
This is especially helpful when I do my reading in DEVONthink and have WikiLinks turned on and set to automatic.
Now, to make sure I spot these concepts every time — and this is no small feat, considering that Greek is an inflected language and the same concept or verb may show up in variety of different forms — I get a special help from my favorite DT feature: aliases.
It is only a matter of finding out the known forms for a particular concept and importing them into DT. I will not go into details about how I get this done, since it involves a third-party software. I will only say that is it a great help the fact that the terms (to be used as aliases) need only to be in a comma separated string. (In case anyone is interested, let me know and I will be happy to talk about it in another post). Now, after I have the aliases in place, I can rest assured that I will never miss an occurrence of some important concept and also that I won’t need to go looking for my notes in case one of the concepts pops-up.
After a little while doing this, here is what I am reading looks like:
Certainly easier than it was before 🙂
