Friday, February 24, 2012

My Thoughts on Digital vs. Paper

In response to post by Marian Pierre-Louis:

For a new problem, I open a new tab in a spreadsheet where I already have a mix of "standard" tabs I use per project (my personal research being 1 project) & "free-form" tabs.

The standard tabs are:
- table with individuals as rows vs record types as columns, boxes colored to indicate whether record found / should exist / doesn't apply for this individual
- tab per set of parents, showing table extract of any located records about each and their children before marriage, for comparison & annotation

Examples of free-form tabs are:
- combo research plans / logs (eg cemeteries, BMD records), in table format
- table of responses from DNA matches, by type, contact info, ancestor names / locations
- ongoing research or brick wall, eg is Anna, Susanna, Anna Susanna 1, 2, or 3 people?, or several possibilities for ship arrival record annotated with pluses & minuses

Can easily flip from tab to tab as needed, to images of original documents or software program or Word with timeline in different windows. Working with paper, eyes can only see one image at a time, too :-). Digital is easier to share with others, and harder to misplace, and with something like Dropbox, automatically backed up and synch'ed to other devices.

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