But how can you compensate for the imprecision of such a note? By creating idea index cards and keeping them in an idea file. You can use a series of index cards with titles such as “Parallelisms between Possible Worlds,” “Inconsistencies,” “Structure Variations,” “Time Warps,” etc. For example, the “Time Warps” card will contain a precise reference to the pages in which Sheckley discusses this concept. Afterward you can place all the references to time warps at the designated point of your final work plan, yet you can also move the index card, merge it with the others, and place it before or after another card in the file. Similarly, you might find it useful to create thematic index cards and the appropriate file, ideal for a thesis on the history of ideas. If your work on possible worlds in American science fiction explores the various ways in which different authors confronted various logical-cosmological problems, this type of file will be ideal.
But let us suppose that you have decided to organize your thesis differently, with an introductory chapter that frames the theme, and then a chapter for each of the principal authors (Sheckley, Heinlein, Asimov, Brown, etc.), or even a series of chapters each dedicated to an exemplary novel. In this case, you need an author file. The author index card “Sheckley” will contain the references needed to find the passages in which he writes about possible worlds. And you may also choose to divide this file into sections on “Time Warps,”
“Parallelisms,” “Inconsistencies,” etc.
Let us suppose instead that your thesis addresses the question in a much more theoretical way, using science fiction as a reference point but in fact discussing the logic of possible worlds. The science fiction references will be less systematic, and will instead serve as a source of entertaining quotes. In this case, you will need a quote file, where you will record on the “Time Warps” index card a particularly apt phrase from Sheckley; and on the “Parallelisms” index card, you will record Brown’s description of two perfectly identical universes where the only variation is the lacing pattern of the protagonist’s shoelaces. And so on.
But what if Sheckley’s book is not currently available, but you remember reading it at a friend’s house in another city, long before you envisioned a thesis that included themes of time warps and parallelism? In this case, you fortunately prepared a readings index card on Mindswap at your friend’s house, including its bibliographical information, a general summary, a series of evaluations addressing its importance, and a series of quotes that at the time seemed particularly apt. (See sections 3.2.2 and 4.2.3 for more information on the readings file.)
So depending on the context, we can create index cards of various types: connection index cards that link ideas and sections of the work plan; question index cards dealing with how to confront a particular problem; recommendation index cards that note ideas provided by others, suggestions for further developments, etc. Each type of index card should have a different color, and should include in the top right corner abbreviations that crossreference one series of cards to another, and to the general plan. The result is something majestic.
But must you really write all these index cards? Of course not. You can have a simple readings file instead, and collect all your other ideas in notebooks. You can limit yourself to the quote file because your thesis (for example, “The Feminine in Women Writers of the 1940s”) starts from a very precise plan, has little critical literature to examine, and simply requires you to collect abundant textual material. As you can see, the nature of the thesis suggests the nature of the index cards.
My only suggestion is that a given file be complete and unified. For example, suppose that you have books by Smith, Rossi, Braun, and De Gomera at home, while in the library you have read books by Dupont, Lupescu, and Nagasaki. If you file only these three, and rely on memory (and on your confidence in their availability) for the other four, how will you proceed when the time comes to begin writing? Will you work half with books and half with index cards? And if you have to restructure your work plan, what materials will you need? Books, index cards, notebooks, or notes? Rather, it will be useful to file cards on Dupont, Lupescu, and Nagasaki in full and with an abundance of quotes, but also to create more succinct index cards for Smith, Rossi, Braun, and De Gomera, perhaps by documenting the page numbers of relevant quotes, instead of copying them in their entirety. At the very least, always work on homogeneous material that is easy to move and handle. This way, you will know at a glance what you have read and what remains to be read.
With that said, in some cases it is convenient and useful to put everything on index cards. Imagine a literary thesis in which you must find and comment on many significant quotes on the same topic, but originating from many different authors. Suppose your topic is “The Concept of Life as Art in Romantic and Decadent Writers.” In table 4.2 you will find examples of four index cards that gather useful quotes on this topic.
As you can see, each index card bears in the top left corner the abbreviation “QT” to distinguish it from other types of index cards, and then includes the theme “Life as Art.” Why do I specify the theme even though I already know what it is? Because the thesis could develop so that “Life as Art” becomes only a part of the work; because this file could also serve me after the thesis and end up merged with a quote file on other themes; because I could find these cards 20 years later and ask myself what the devil they refer to. In addition to these two headings, I have noted the quote’s author. In this case, the last name suffices because you are supposed to already have biographical index cards on these authors, or have written about them at the beginning of your thesis. Finally, the body of the index card bears the quote, however short or long it may be. (It could be short or very long.)
Table 4.2
QUOTE INDEX CARDS
Let us look at the index card for Whistler. There is a quote in Italian followed by a question mark. This means that I found the sentence quoted in another author’s book, but I am not sure where it comes from, whether it is correct, or whether the original is in English. After I started this card, I happened to find the original text, and I recorded it along with the appropriate references. I can now use this index card for a correct citation.
Let us turn to the card for Villiers de l’Isle Adam. I have written the quote from the English translation of the French original.3 I know what book it comes from, but the information is incomplete. This is a good example of an index card that I must complete. Similarly incomplete is the card for Gautier.4 Wilde’s index card is complete, however, with the original quote in English.
Now, I could have found Wilde’s original quote in a copy of the book that I have at home, but shame on me if I neglected writing the index card, because I will forget about it by the time I am finishing my thesis. Shame on me also if I simply wrote on the index card “see page xxxiv” without copying the quote, because when the time comes to write my thesis, I will need all of the texts at hand in order to copy the exact quotations. Therefore, although writing index cards takes some time, it will save you much more in the end.
Table 4.3
CONNECTION INDEX CARD
Table 4.3 shows an example of a connection index card for the thesis on metaphor in seventeenth-century treatise writers that we discussed in section
3.2.4. Here I used the abbreviation “Conn.” to designate the type of card, and I wrote a topic that I will research in depth, “The Passage from the Tactile to the Visual.” I do not yet know if this topic will become a chapter, a small section, a simple footnote, or even (why not?) the central topic of the thesis. I annotated some ideas that came to me from reading a certain author, and indicated the books to consult and the ideas to develop. As I page through my index cards once the first draft of my thesis is completed, I will see whether I have neglected an idea that was important, and I will need to make some decisions: revise the thesis to make this idea fit; decide that it was not worth developing; insert a footnote to show that
