I'm finishing up the fourth year of my PhD, meaning that I've spent a fair amount of time reading papers over the past few years. In my first year, I decided I was going to try to stay consistent with the way that I read and took notes on papers, so it would be easier to look back when I needed a quick reference. To that end, I created a private wordpress.com blog, and everytime (ok, most times) I read a paper, I'd take some quick notes as a Wordpress post. Each post contains a few bulletpoints about the content of the paper, my take, author names, a link to the paper, a few tags (e.g. birdsong, langauge, machine learning), plus screenshots of the main figures that I want to remember. It only takes <1 minute to add the extra metadata, and makes it much easier to index.

The main benefit for me is that when I'm trying to remember a paper I read recently, I can either search for it on my blog, or scroll down the page. In addition, I keep other notes, research idea, or even links to websites I like or resources I find useful as posts on the site as well. I categorize them all as either papers, datasets, research ideas, etc. If you're a new graduate student, or just someone looking for a good easy way to take notes, I recommend it. It's nice to have an easy cloud-based WYSIWIG editor for notes, as compared to this blog (timsainburg.com), where every post is a Jupyter notebook.

Now that I've got quite a few papers on there (still fewer than I should / would have liked), it seems like a good time to look back through and reflect on what I've been reading over the years. Plus, quick, fun datascience/dataviz project.