I will not elaborate further on the various types of index cards. Let us limit ourselves to discussing how to organize the primary sources, along with the readings index cards of the secondary sources.
4.2.2 Organizing the Primary Sources
Readings index cards are useful for organizing critical literature. I would not use index cards, or at least not the same kind of index cards, to organize primary sources. In other words, if you compose a thesis on Joyce, you will naturally write index cards for all the books and articles on Joyce that you are able to find, but it would be strange to create index cards for Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. The same would apply if you wrote a thesis on articles of the Italian Civil Code, or a thesis in the history of mathematics on Felix Klein’s Erlangen Program. Ideally you will always have the primary sources at hand. This is not difficult, as long as you are dealing with books by a classic author available in many good critical editions, or those by a contemporary author that are readily available on the market. In any case, the primary sources are an indispensable investment. You can underline a book or a series of books that you own, even in various colors. Let us talk briefly about underlining:
Underlining personalizes the book. The marks become traces of your interest. They allow you to return to the book even after a long period, and find at a glance what originally interested you. But you must underline sensibly. Some people underline everything, which is equivalent to not underlining at all. On the other hand, it is possible that on the same page there is information that interests you on different levels. In that case, it is essential to differentiate the underlining.
Use colors. Use markers with a fine point. Assign a color to each topic, and use the same colors on the work plan and the various index cards. This will be useful when you are drafting your work, because you will know right away that red refers to passages important for the first chapter, and green to those important for the second chapter.
Associate an abbreviation with each color (or use abbreviations instead of the colors). For example, going back to our topic of possible worlds in science fiction, use the abbreviation “TW” to signal everything pertinent to time warps, or “I” to mark inconsistencies between possible worlds. If your thesis concerns multiple authors, assign an abbreviation to each of them.
Use abbreviations to emphasize the relevance of information. A bracket with the annotation “IMP” can signify a very important passage, and you will not need to underline each individual line. “QT” will indicate not only that the passage is important, but that you also want to quote it in its entirety. “QT/TW” will indicate that the passage is an ideal quote to illustrate the question of time warps.
Use abbreviations to designate the passages you must reread. Some passages may seem obscure to you when you first read them. You can mark the top margins of these pages with a big “R,” so that you know you must review them as you go deeper into the subject, and after other readings have clarified these ideas for you.
When should you not underline? When the book is not yours, obviously, or if it is a rare edition of great commercial value that you cannot modify without devaluing. In these cases, photocopy the important pages and underline those. Or get a small notebook where you can copy the salient passages, with your comments interspersed. Or develop a special file for the primary sources, although this would require a huge effort, because you would have to practically catalog the texts page by page. However, this can work if your thesis is on Alain-Fournier’s Le grand Meaulnes (The Wanderer), a very short little book. But what if it is on Hegel’s The Science of Logic? And what if, returning to our experiment in Alessandria’s library (section 3.2.4), you must catalog the seventeenth-century edition of Tesauro’s Cannocchiale aristotelico? You will have to resort to photocopies and the aforementioned notebook, annotated throughout with colors and abbreviations.
Supplement the underlining with adhesive page markers. Copy the abbreviations and colors on the portion of the marker that sticks out from the pages.
Beware the “alibi of photocopies”! Photocopies are indispensable instruments. They allow you to keep with you a text you have already read in the library, and to take home a text you have not read yet. But a set of photocopies can become an alibi. A student makes hundreds of pages of photocopies and takes them home, and the manual labor he exercises in doing so gives him the impression that he possesses the work. Owning the photocopies exempts the student from actually reading them. This sort of vertigo of accumulation, a neocapitalism of information, happens to many. Defend yourself from this trap: as soon as you have the photocopy, read it and annotate it immediately. If you are not in a great hurry, do not photocopy something new before you own (that is, before you have read and annotated) the previous set of photocopies. There are many things that I do not know because I photocopied a text and then relaxed as if I had read it.
If the book is yours and it does not have antiquarian value, do not hesitate to annotate it. Do not trust those who say that you must respect books. You respect books by using them, not leaving them alone. Even if the book is unmarked, you won’t make much money reselling it to a bookseller, so you may as well leave traces of your ownership.
4.2.3 The Importance of Readings Index Cards
Among all the types of index cards we have discussed, the most common and the most indispensable are the readings index cards. These are where you precisely annotate all the references contained in a book or article, transcribe key quotes, record your evaluation, and append other observations. In short, the readings index card perfects the bibliographical index card described in section 3.2.2. The latter contains only the information useful for tracking down the book, while the former contains all the information on a book or article, and therefore must be much larger. You can use standard formats or make your own cards, but in general they should correspond to half a letter-size (or half an A4size) sheet. They should be made of cardboard, so that you can easily page through them in the index card box, or gather them into a pack bound with a rubber band. They should be made of a material appropriate for both a ballpoint and a fountain pen, so that they do not absorb or diffuse the ink, but instead allow the pen to run smoothly. Their structure should be more or less that of the model index cards proposed in tables 4.4 through 4.11.
Nothing prohibits you from filling up many index cards, and this might actually be a good idea for important books. The cards should be numbered consecutively, and the front of each card should bear abbreviated information about the book or article in question. There are many ways to catalog the book on your readings index card. Your method also depends on your memory, as there are people who have poor memories and need to write everything, and others who only require a quick note. Let us say that the following is the standard method:
1. Record precise bibliographical information that is, if possible, more complete than that you have recorded on the bibliographical index card. The latter helped you locate the book, while the readings index card will help you talk about the book and cite it properly in the final bibliography. You should have the book in your hands when you write the readings index card, so that you can obtain all the available information, such as the edition, the publisher’s information, etc.
2. Record the author’s information, if he is not a well-known authority.
3. Write a short (or long) summary of the book or article.
4. Transcribe the full text of passages you wish to quote (assuming you are not already using a quote file for this purpose). Use quotation marks and note precisely the page number or numbers. You may also want to record extra quotes to provide context when you are writing. Be sure not to confuse a quote with a paraphrase! (See section 5.3.2.)
5. Record your personal comments throughout your summary. To avoid mistaking them for the author’s own thoughts, write your comments inside square brackets, and in color.
6. Mark the card with the appropriate abbreviation or color so that it clearly corresponds to the correct section of your work. If your card refers to multiple sections, write multiple abbreviations. If it refers to the thesis as a whole, designate this somehow.
So that we can avoid further generalities, let me provide some practical examples. In tables 4.4 through 4.11 you will find some examples of readings index cards. Instead of inventing topics and methods, I retrieved the index cards from my own thesis, “The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas.” My filing method is not necessarily the best one. These index cards provide
