Kyle Harrison
concept

Taking Notes on Podcasts

Taking Notes on Podcasts

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  • So @AirrAudio Just Updated It’s… (tweet)

Saved from Roam

  • Tags: #Podcast Note-taking Otter.ai Roam Research
  • Learning effectively with podcasts in Networked Thought and Learning by Stian Haklev
  • The amount of high-quality content available as podcasts is astounding, but coming up with an effective approach to listening, processing and actually learning from them is not trivial.
  • “I am now walking round after round around this beautiful, calm lake, with these incredible stars above me. And I’m feeling very, very good. My body’s not tired at all. I am not disturbed by anyone. There’s no noise or cars. I have time. I am learning incredibly interesting things. I’m not stressed out about my memory because I’m able to capture my thoughts and go back to them later. It reminds me a bit of monks or, you know, all kinds of people walking and learning. Stian Haklev
  • While we lived in Toronto, I would go out almost every night, traipsing through the ravines, or finding different quiet residential streets, while listening to Audiobooks or podcasts. In Lausanne, we live in a tiny apartment, and I spend most of the day sitting in front of a computer, so going for a walk in the evening both gives me some privacy and a chance to move.
  • “What else do I want to do with my life. What do I want to learn?”, and also the strength to be able to say “This might take me 10 years to learn, I better get going” rather than “That’s too long”. #Learning
  • A Podcast is really a very simple (but brilliant) technology. At its core, each episode is just an MP3 file stored somewhere publicly accessible on the net, and the actual podcast is a simple text file, using the same RSS format which enabled Google Reader to follow blogs.
  • When I’m getting into a new thinker, or preparing to read a complex book, I enjoy finding several interviews with the author from different perspectives – this gives me a high-level overview, and makes it much easier to effectively take notes once you dive into the book (or decide to skip it). I’ve also done the same for concepts I’m curious about, from meta-modernism to non-violent communication.
  • Side-note, aka lament, about academic metadata #PDF Academic Research Scite.ai
    • I’ve been frustrated about the state of academic metadata for almost a decade. A great read, all the way from 2004, is a paper called “Why can’t I manage academic papers like MP3s? The evolution and intent of metadata standard”. They talk about how back in the days when you ripped audio CDs, programs would actually upload fingerprints of the audio to a community server, and download community-supplied metadata. Later, MP3 files have embedded metadata (ID3 tags), meaning that you can move them seamlessly from iTunes to any other app, and it will “just work”…
    • 16 years later, and Zotero has some support for automatically fetching metadata, PDFs have a metadata field that nobody are using, but we’re still mostly stuck in the stone-age… Why can’t I just drag and drop citations from a paper into my citation manager, and have the metadata imported, and the PDFs automatically downloaded?
  • Trying to keep all the ideas presented in a one hour Podcast in your head until you come back is a recipe for frustration, but bringing a notebook with you while walking doesn’t make sense. Otter.ai to the rescue!
  • This has really been a game changer. While listening, I might stop the podcast, and record a few key points, but I often add my own connections and reflections triggered by the podcast (as above). Standing in a beautiful forest, and just talking, you can be very reflective and calm. And while importing it into Roam takes a tiny bit of time, it’s vastly faster than trying to transcribe the entire text.
  • Having captured the notes, I later sit down with Otter and Roam generally a few days later. A recent trick is to create a new folder in Otter for episodes where you will be taking a lot of notes, to make it easier to process all the notes from an episode at once. I go into each note, select “Export as text”, and copy to Roam.
  • How to Take Smart Notes from Podcasts - with Roam Research and Zotero by Shu Omi