# Using web clipping and sidewiki to gather and synthesize information


One piece of functionality in
[researchr](http://reganmian.net/wiki/researchr:start) that I find
myself using quite frequently, is the ability to clip arbitrary amounts
of texts from any webpage and send it to a given wikipage very quickly.
The way it works is that I select some text (if I don't select any text,
it will just use the page URL), and hit a key combo (Ctrl+Alt+Cmd+I).
The system then pops up a box asking me which page I want to add the
clipping to.

![ left](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Screen-Shot-2012-05-10-at-22.42.33.png)Above
you see such a box - it automatically grabs the title from the web page
to be used for the link, but allows me to edit it. I click OK, get a
tiny [Growl](http://growl.info) acknowledgement, and I can continue on
with no interruption.

I
might find some more text that I want to clip, from the same page, or
from a different page, and I can simply click Ctrl+Alt+Cmd+J for
"clip-again", which will send the text to the same place I sent the last
clipping, without bothering to ask (again I will only see a Growl
acknowledgment).
![right ](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Screen-Shot-2012-05-10-at-22.44.45.png)This is on the theory that often you are gathering
information on the same topic from several sources.

If the page doesn't already exist, it gets created with the proper
headline. If it already exists, the new text or URL gets appended at the
bottom of the page, separated by a line, and with a link back to the
original page. If the clipping was from an article in researchr, the
link is a properly formatted citation.

The idea is that I don't necessarily need to "integrate" the information
with the rest of the article right away. I can keep adding information
to it, and when I get around to it, I can sit down and organize it
properly. Sometimes I go out to research a subject, and add a large
amount of links or information in an afternoon, and then sit down to
organize it, other times pages grow slowly from month to month, before I
get around to doing anything.

The article on [[fuzzy text matching]] is a good example of the result
of a day's work, where I finally sat down to clean it up, and document
some results of my experimentation. During the clipping, [it looked
quite
messy](http://reganmian.net/wiki/fuzzy_text_matching?rev=1331575530).

![](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Screen-Shot-2012-05-10-at-22.57.031.png)

But [[fuzzy text matching|the final version]] is a very useful
reference for me, and might even be useful to others.

![](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Screen-Shot-2012-05-10-at-22.56.29.png)

I recently came across an interesting [blog
entry](http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.ca/2011/07/learning-is-learning.html)
criticizing the theory of andragogy, which I had seen referred to in
several papers on MOOCs. Not only were the points in the blog post well
made, but the post had attracted a range of comments, and some had even
written entire blog posts in response. I felt the need to summarize and
organize this information, so I used the clipping functionality to grab
all the relevant text, and then used the side-by-side view to organize
the article.

The side-by-side view is inspired by the split-screen view in
[Scrivener](http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php) (of course,
this is not something that Scrivener invented, but that is where I
really learnt the power of having raw notes on one side, and the thing
you are writing on the other side), and I use it to turn the raw
clippings from PDFs I've read in Skim into higher level notes ([as
detailed
here](http://reganmian.net/blog/2012/04/11/semantic-researchrdokuwiki-search/)),
but the functionality is available on any webpage. You can even edit any
wikipage "with itself".

![](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Screen-Shot-2012-05-10-at-23.09.04.png)

Using this approach, I was able to quickly gather information from a
number of webpages, grab some pictures from a PDF, and organize it all
into one succinct page. This gave me a much better overview of the
different arguments, and gives me a good base to go out and learn more
about andragogy, or to think more critically about whether the theory is
relevant or not.

I made a quick screencast showing the tools in use, pretty much as I've
narrated in this blog post.

[Screencast](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr2GH1efSHU)

Stian