Now that my degree is finished and I’m letting my dissertation sit for a bit before I start revising it for the book, I am finally in a position to begin a new project. I’m stepping out of my normal focus on prose and lyric to work on performance in Cymbeline.

I’m trying a new system for taking notes in and on the text. I like to have wide margins to scribble on – I’ve become completely incapable of thinking without a writing utensil – but at the same time working with electronic texts gives me a better chance at maintaining some semblance of organization between my notes, research, and the text itself. I’ve come up with a hybrid solution that I think may help.

I downloaded the complete text of the play from MIT in html form and then ran the file through html2text to strip out the html. This gives a nice, clean, reasonably formatted text file.

I do about 90% of my work in Emacs, which (in addition to the greatest LaTeX support ever) features Org Mode: the note taking framework of the gods. I opened the text file in Emacs and saved it as an Org file. I had to change some of the notations for the act and scene numbers to turn them into proper headings and then I wrapped the whole thing in verse tags to keep the line breaks in place. With this setup, I can export part or all of the file as a pdf with decent typography and nice, wide margins.

After I print out a scene and think all over it in blue ink, I can then add my notes and observations to the org file in a drawer or under a separate heading. This keeps the text intact while also allowing me to keep my notes associated with the larger context of the play. Since org supports linking both within a file and to other files, I can cross-reference my notes and start adding citations with a link to the pdf’s of articles. And as a bonus, since everything is in a text file it’s trivial to backup, search, and move to other programs when I’m ready to start a proper draft.