John Bradley’s abstract for his talk at this year’s Digital Humanities conference, Thinking Differently About Thinking: Pliny and Scholarship in the Humanities pointed me to one of the better discussions about what we know about how humanities scholars do research. Scholarly Work in the Humanities and the Evolving Information Environment is a CLIR report that is available in HTML and PDF. The thing that stands out for me reading this is that humanists are readers (and writers.) Reading is research and writing is research. As John puts it when he talks about Pliny, the hard thing to pin down is when we shift from Reading/Interpreting to Interpreting/Writing. It is that turn when you think you can respond to what you have read that is what Pliny (and other types of notetaking software like Tinderbox) is supposed to help with. If you have invested the time in taking notes while reading then those notes become useful to writing.