Swing Dynamite Blog
Thoughts and news about swing dancing in Ottawa
Notes on Keeping a Digital Dance Journal
[ No Comments ] Posted by byron on Jan 21, 2010 in General
Just read a great post by Lindy Hopper Carl Nelson on the art of keeping a digital dance journal.
Personally I’ve found that a simple notebook is a big part of keeping dance notes. Lately I’ve been favouring a small Moleskine notebook using tabs to index the subjects. I used to use a larger Blueline notebook but I found that it was a little bulky to carry around everywhere.
That’s part of my personal secret in terms of taking notes: instead of having one notebook dedicated just to a single subject–eg. Lindy Hop, or even swing dancing–I just use one notebook for everything, and I date every entry. I’ve found it’s often easier to find things chronologically in any case, and the fact that I use one notebook for everything means that I’m less likely to forget it. Any sections that are really important, earn tabs–I like the little plastic ones made by 3M.
Also, lately my iPhone has become a secondary note-taking device since it’s always with me, but it’s not as quick to take notes on as a paper notebook.
I’ve been experimenting lately with a great online/offline tool, Evernote, to keep all of my note-taking organized. Evernote stores your notes from various media, whether it’s scanned documents, audio notes, etc. and keeps it all in the cloud. It even does optical character recognition on your photos and indexes the text.