Emergent scholarship

Course Lessons

Extracting information

13 min read

Lesson overview

Objective: Extract high-value information from a variety of sources

Summary: Most information arrives in formats you can’t easily work with—PDFs, videos, podcasts, emails, and images don’t lend themselves to annotation, editing, or integration with other materials. Even text information is scattered across different applications and platforms. To convert raw sources into something useful for your academic work, you must extract what matters and move it somewhere you can process it further. This lesson establishes practices for systematic extraction that transforms captured sources into workable materials.

Key habits:

  • Schedule dedicated reading time in your daily or weekly routine (even 30 minutes matters)
  • Engage actively with sources through highlighting and annotation rather than passive reading
  • Extract information that resonates with you, not everything the source contains
  • Create notes associated with original sources so you can trace ideas back to their origins
  • Ask “Why did I save this?” to guide what you extract and how you engage with it

Introduction

Every idea you have is downstream from what you consume. - James Clear (2020)

Extraction is where you move from having sources to having ideas. It’s laborious and time-consuming, but it’s also where genuine understanding begins.

You’ve filtered your information sources to reduce volume. You’ve captured promising materials into a personal library. But those captured sources remain in their original formats—PDFs sitting in a reference manager, bookmarked articles, saved videos, emails containing useful information. None of these formats are conducive to the kind of intellectual work academics do. You can’t easily annotate a video. You can’t search across multiple PDFs for related concepts. You can’t synthesise ideas when they’re locked in their original containers.

Information needs to be extracted from source materials before you can work with it. This means pulling out relevant passages, key arguments, useful examples, and interesting observations, then moving them somewhere you can engage with them more deeply. The information in an email about a meeting decision needs to move into your daily or project notes. Insights from a conference presentation need to be captured in literature notes. Key passages from an article need to be highlighted and annotated. For every source format you encounter, you need both a process for extraction and a destination for the extracted material.

The challenge is that extraction is genuinely laborious. There’s no quick fix or efficient shortcut. Reading a 25-page academic article and extracting the most relevant information might take an hour. Watching a conference presentation and transcribing key points with timestamps could take as long as the presentation itself. Processing a book chapter with careful annotation requires sustained attention. This is real work that demands both time and cognitive effort.

Yet many academics skip extraction entirely. They read articles but don’t take notes. They attend presentations but don’t capture insights. They tell themselves they’ll remember the important parts, but memory proves unreliable. Or they highlight passages in PDFs but never return to those highlights, treating extraction as an end in itself rather than the beginning of a process. Without extraction, captured sources remain inert—technically available but practically unusable.

Understanding extraction as knowledge work

Extraction isn’t merely transcribing content from one place to another. It’s an active intellectual process where you identify what matters, what resonates, what connects to other ideas. When you extract information, you’re already beginning the interpretive work that characterises academic scholarship.

What to extract

The question “What should I extract from this source?” often paralyses people. There’s no single correct answer because extraction depends on your purposes and perspectives. What you extract from an article on assessment practices will differ from what a colleague extracts from the same article, even if you’re both working on assessment-related projects.

Extract what resonates with you intellectually. This might be:

  • Arguments or claims that strike you as particularly insightful or questionable
  • Evidence or examples that illuminate concepts you’re working with
  • Methodological approaches that could inform your own research
  • Framings or perspectives that shift how you think about a problem
  • Connections to other sources or ideas you’re exploring
  • Questions or puzzles the source raises but doesn’t fully resolve

The common thread is intellectual resonance—something in the source connects with your current thinking, challenges your assumptions, or opens new directions. Trust your instincts about what’s worth extracting. If a passage makes you pause, or you find yourself thinking “that’s interesting” or “I’m not sure I agree with that”, extract it.

The role of annotation

Simply highlighting passages creates only marginally more value than reading without extraction. The real work happens when you annotate—when you write your own thoughts alongside the extracted information. Annotation is where you begin processing what you’re reading, having a conversation with the author, and developing your own perspective.

Effective annotation includes:

  • Critical questions: What assumptions does this claim rest on? What evidence would challenge it? How does this compare to other perspectives?
  • Connections: How does this relate to other sources I’ve read? What does this remind me of? Where else have I encountered similar ideas?
  • Applications: How might I use this in my teaching? Could this inform my current research? What implications does this have for practice?
  • Reactions: Why do I find this compelling? What makes me sceptical? How does this change my thinking?

The annotations you write during extraction become the seeds of your own thinking. When you return to process this material further (see the next lesson on processing), you’ll be engaging with your annotated extracts rather than raw source material. The quality of your extraction and annotation directly affects the quality of thinking you can do later.

Creating extraction habits

The biggest obstacle to regular extraction isn’t methodology—it’s simply making time for it. Reading, watching, or listening to sources with enough attention to extract meaningful information requires protected time in your schedule.

Scheduling extraction time

Many academics treat reading as something to squeeze in when there’s spare time. This ensures it rarely happens, or happens only under pressure when you desperately need information for an immediate project. Better to schedule regular extraction time, even if brief, rather than hoping to find extended reading sessions.

Where extraction time fits:

  • Daily reading blocks: Even 30 minutes at the end of each day creates space for engaging with one article or working through part of a longer source
  • Weekly deep reading sessions: A 2-hour block once or twice weekly allows for sustained engagement with complex sources
  • Between-task buffers: The 20 minutes between a meeting and your next commitment might not suit deep work but could work for extracting information from a short article

The specific timing matters less than the consistency. Regular, scheduled extraction time ensures your captured sources actually get engaged with rather than accumulating as guilt-inducing reminders of reading you meant to do.

Tools and workflows for extraction

Different source formats demand different extraction approaches. Understanding what works for each format helps you develop efficient workflows.

For academic articles (PDFs):

Most reference managers (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote) now include built-in PDF readers with annotation capabilities. These let you highlight passages and add comments directly in the PDF, then extract those annotations into a note associated with the source. This keeps your extracts connected to the original material—crucial for citation and reference later.

If using Zotero, you can highlight and annotate within the application, then create a note from those annotations. This note becomes your literature note for that source, containing your extracted passages along with your commentary.

For videos and presentations:

Video content requires more manual extraction since you can’t simply highlight passages. Consider:

  • Taking time-stamped notes as you watch, allowing you to relocate specific sections later
  • Pausing frequently to capture key points rather than trying to watch continuously
  • Checking if transcripts are available (many conference platforms and YouTube videos offer these)
  • Being selective—extract only the most relevant sections rather than comprehensive summaries

For web content and blog posts:

Web clippers (see the previous lesson on capturing) can save articles directly into your note-taking system. Once saved, you can highlight and annotate within your notes app. The key is adding your own commentary rather than just saving highlighted passages.

For books:

Physical books require either writing marginalia directly in the book or taking separate notes as you read. Digital books on Kindle or similar platforms allow highlighting that can be exported. Regardless of format, the principle remains: extract meaningful passages and add your own annotations.

Connecting extracts to sources

A critical but often overlooked aspect of extraction is maintaining clear connections between extracted information and original sources. Six months from now, when you’re writing a literature review, you need to know exactly where that insightful quote came from, what article contained that useful methodology, which author made that particular argument.

Every extracted piece of information should include:

  • Source identification: Author, title, year at minimum
  • Location information: Page numbers, timestamps, section headings
  • Full bibliographic details: Either embedded in the note or linked to an entry in your reference manager

Reference managers solve this problem elegantly by keeping literature notes connected to bibliographic entries. When you create a note in Zotero associated with a source, the connection persists. This means you can generate citations directly from your notes during writing, and can always return to the original source if you need to verify a quote or check context.

Without these connections, extracted information becomes orphaned—potentially useful but practically unusable because you can’t properly cite it. The time invested in maintaining these connections during extraction pays enormous dividends during the writing process.

Pause and reflect

Pause and reflect

There’s often no bright line between extracting and processing information. While you’re annotating a text, you’re already processing it—making connections, developing interpretations, generating questions. And processing a text frequently means returning to extract more information, either from the same source or from additional sources that become relevant.

Don’t get too caught up in which stage you’re at. The boundaries between filtering, capturing, extracting, and processing are permeable by design. What matters is moving information from raw sources toward processed understanding through whatever path works for your thinking.

It’s also easy to fall into extraction as performance—highlighting everything that seems remotely interesting, taking comprehensive notes that capture every detail, creating beautiful annotations that never get used. Remember that extraction serves a purpose: to pull out what you need for your work. Extract less, but engage more deeply with what you do extract.

The goal isn’t to have the most comprehensive notes on a source. The goal is to have notes that actually help you when you’re writing, teaching, or researching. Sometimes this means a single extracted paragraph with a critical question attached. Sometimes it means extensive notes on multiple sections. Let your purpose guide your extraction rather than trying to extract everything perfectly.

Activity

Key takeaways

  • Extraction transforms inert sources into workable materials. Captured sources sitting in reference managers or bookmark folders remain potential rather than actual resources for your work. Extraction—pulling out relevant passages, adding annotations, creating literature notes—converts potential into usable materials. Without extraction, your carefully curated library is just an accumulation of PDFs and links you meant to engage with.

  • Annotation is where intellectual work begins. Simply highlighting passages creates minimal value. The real work happens when you write your own thoughts alongside extracted information—questioning claims, making connections, identifying applications. These annotations become the raw material for your own thinking rather than just reminders of what someone else said. Quality of extraction depends more on the depth of your annotations than the comprehensiveness of your highlights.

  • Systematic extraction requires scheduled time. Reading with the attention necessary for meaningful extraction doesn’t happen in spare moments between other commitments. It requires protected time in your schedule, even if just 30 minutes daily. Without scheduled extraction time, captured sources accumulate unread while you remain perpetually intending to engage with them “when things calm down”—a moment that never arrives.

Resources

Do you have any experiences or insights that you’d like to share with others? What habits and routines have you implemented in your own practice that have helped in this area? Do you have any questions about your specific context that are not addressed in this lesson? Please leave a comment for other participants in the field below.

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