Progressive summarization

I promised I would explain Forte’s notion of progressive summarization which I mentioned in a recent post. The idea concerns how to transform typical annotations and highlights taken while reading into what Ahren’s would call Smart notes – stand-alone notes that capture the essence of what was read.

The process works like this. Read and annotate as usual using an app that allows the isolation of the highlights and annotations. My example is based on using Highlights while reading journal article pdfs on my iPad. In the following image you can see a little bit of the article pdf to the left of the image and the extracted highlights and annotations to the right. This extracted content can then be shared with another app. Ideally, the extracted content would allow linkages back to the original content and this works when moving content to Apple Notes. This works only when the content resides on the same device is not very practical long term. I simply cut and paste the content into a Google doc for the additional processing I describe next. The page references provide a way to connect to the original content.

Forte suggests the following sequence with the extracted content. First,, bold the most important ideas. Then, in a second pass, highlight the essential ideas from this bolded content (the reason I like Google files in drive is the opportunity to both bold, highlight, and add text). Finally, write a summary of the highlighted material. He suggests bullet points. I prefer the Ahren stand-alone notes as a way to record the key ideas I may want to use later.

If you are interested in an example of the finished product, I have embedded a pdf of progressive summarization I created in this format.

The goals of this approach are to find the most essential information to retain a context that maintains the context from which the key items extracted. Ideally these documents would be retained in a meaningful way. Making certain the full citation is included and searchable would be one way to do this. To tell the truth, I store the stand-alone notes and go back to the annotation original if necessary.