Workflows, Revisited: Research Practices and Digital Infrastructure
Rebuilding the Series with Purpose
In May 2020, I launched a blog series titled Workflows, aimed at exploring how scholars organize and sustain research productivity. A follow-up post in July, “Welcome” to Graduate School, marked what I imagined would be the beginning of a larger project. But the series stalled after that second entry. My ambitions had outpaced both my capacity and expertise.
This post is an attempt to revive the Workflows series—this time with a narrower scope and clearer intention. Drawing from my recent experiences conducting archival research in Paris, I reflect on how I manage information capture, organization, and analysis using a hybrid system of analog and digital tools. While you can follow my day-to-day archival work through my newsletter, this post offers deeper thinking on the logistical and cognitive practices that sustain me through long-term research.
The first Workflows post outlines the literature that shapes my approach to time management and productivity. The second one discusses how I capture and store notes. This post extends those reflections into the messy world of archives, showing how my systems have evolved—sometimes out of necessity, sometimes by design.
The Value of Order: From Analog to Digital
Henry IV allegedly declared that no peasant in his kingdom should go without a chicken in their pot on Sundays. While this phrase has traditionally signified welfare and prosperity, I’ve always associated it—perhaps strangely—with order. A chicken in every pot, and everything in its place.
In the life of a researcher, chaos is unavoidable. Archives are unpredictable. Notes accumulate faster than you can process them. Distractions proliferate. Yet for all its creative potential, unmanaged disorder erodes the ability to think clearly. Effective research workflows, in contrast, create the conditions for clarity and insight. The goal isn’t perfection; it’s fittingness. Information should live where it belongs.
For me, that begins with analog writing. I wasn’t raised with an iPhone in hand, and I still gravitate toward physical notebooks. My daily diary—currently a pocket-sized notebook from Librairie Gallimard—anchors my day. In it, I summarize events and conversations, jot down passing thoughts, and occasionally reflect. Though I sometimes lapse in the summer months, I try to digitize these entries periodically into Day One, which I use solely for personal journaling.
Research notes, however, are compartmentalized. One navy blue notebook holds project-related insights, ideas, and ephemera. A separate notebook supports my Persian language practice, and another—taller and black—is for French vocabulary and grammar. Legal pads are always nearby for fleeting thoughts and marginalia, which I scan into Evernote using Scannable. These scans become searchable PDFs, tagged and filed into project-specific folders.
Evernote has been central to my workflow since high school. While its structure isn’t perfect, I’ve created a flexible architecture: folders for archived notebooks, unsorted notes, preliminary exam prep, and so on. New scans enter a general folder before being sorted. The point here is not technical mastery—it’s intentionality. A chicken in every pot, even if some pots are messier than others.
Archival Research: From Capture to Analysis
Archival research presents unique challenges: limited time, fragile documents, inconsistent metadata, and the sheer volume of materials. The solution isn’t a universal method but a consistent one. As many experienced researchers advise: pick a system and stick to it. Mine unfolds in four phases:
Capture
Organize
Process
Analyze
Inspired by David Allen’s Getting Things Done, this framework emphasizes control and adaptability. While my earlier posts focused on note-taking from secondary sources, this one addresses the specific challenge of primary-source management in the archive.
Logo of the U.E.I.F., c. mid-1960s.
Take, for instance, a historical artifact like the logo of the Union des Étudiants Iraniens en France (UE.I.F.). Let’s say I photographed it at La contemporaine in Nanterre using my phone. That image must be quickly integrated into my digital system.
I begin by sorting files by archive location. Each archival box or folder gets its own corresponding folder on my computer. This hierarchy mirrors the archive’s internal logic—box, folder, sub-folder—and ensures retrievability later. I use Permute (available on the Mac App Store) to convert iPhone HEIC image files into PDFs, stitching multiple images into single documents that reflect the contents of a folder or sub-folder.
While Preview or Adobe Acrobat suffice for basic organization, I use DevonThink as my digital repository. DevonThink allows for advanced annotation, OCR conversion, metadata tagging, and powerful search. I learned how to configure it through a course by Avigail S. Oren, Ph.D., and recommend it to anyone handling complex research corpora.
Annotations form the bridge between processing and analysis. For every archival document, I record detailed sourcing metadata and context. I cross-reference this with Evernote, which helps me track image counts and paper quantities per folder. When I upload images from my phone, I already know where they belong.
From here, the final step—analysis—begins. Annotation serves as a first draft of interpretation. I manage citations in both Bookends and EndNote, though I’m still experimenting with the best method for citing archival documents. I plan to write a separate guide on that issue, since I’ve found little guidance online.
Final Thoughts: Towards Intentional Research
So that’s the structure: capture, organize, process, analyze. It’s not revolutionary, but it’s effective. More importantly, it allows me to focus less on logistics and more on the thinking that matters. Archival research can feel overwhelming. The temptation is to default to digital hoarding or postpone processing until “later.” But sustainable research demands habits, not heroics. A thoughtful system doesn’t eliminate uncertainty, but it gives it boundaries. I’d love to hear from you. What are your research workflows? How do you manage your archival materials and integrate your citation systems? What tools have changed the way you work?
Substantial revision: March 25, 2025
