What is a label?
A label is simply a way of categorizing the highlights that you make.
How do labels help you to organize your research?
Throughout our information discovery and detailed reading we might highlight many different parts of the text from many different sources. In many situations this process is manageable and we can easily recall which highlights were associated with which sources. However, as the volume of our sources and highlights grows it becomes increasingly difficult to navigate our collection of information.
The solution that RevNote proposes is the process of applying labels to highlights in-situ. In other words, each time a selection of text is highlighted a label could be applied indicating the theme or topic of that specific snippet of information. This is helpful for several reasons.
The very process of developing a series of themes or topics used to evaluate the material that we are reading will help us keep our research focussed and organized. More importantly, having applied themed labels to our highlighted snippets of text, we will be able to harness the filtering and search capabilities built into the RevNote App.
Example: We have just collected a series of white papers and web articles discussing how businesses should respond to the new GDPR legislation which has come into effect. Our initial research motive is simply to understand the type of information being discussed or suggested online and by whom.
As we start exploring the articles and highlighting different suggestions we realize that we will need to create two series of labels. One series to show the general theme of the suggestion, such as “effect to cold emails” or “effect to newsletters”. Another series to indicate the type of author generating this recommendation, such as “lawyer”, “government body”, “independent business owner”, etc.
After gathering a wide variety of suggestions from varied sources both in the form of web articles and downloadable PDFs we are now ready to start exploring the information that we have uncovered.
In the RevNote workspace we can either select the Sources view which will display a full list of of the sources that we have saved or the Highlights view which will display a list of the individual annotations. We can now use the filter tool and select “Filter by label” to select any of the themed labels that we used during our initial reading.