Obsidian for Academic Publishing - A Walkthrough with Jason Yuh

i'm thrilled to have jason yeah as our guest today uh jason is a phd student at the university of toronto and he's doing some really cool things with obsidian particularly in regard to his research and the work that he's publishing or in the midst of publishing doing much of it through obsidian so it's so cool he's been an active participant on the discord uh forum contributing to a lot of the discussions that are going on in obsidian and it's great to have him on the program today and to showcase some of the work that he's doing so jason welcome thank you so much for that great introduction and just uh great to get to know you anthony and love to be able to share about my experiences with obsidian so i'm excited to be here cool well we're we're very appreciative of it so first before we get into and and really want to kind of hope you'll to see some of your screen sharing and how you go about capturing notes and linking your notes and producing your content but before we even get into that how did you even discover obsidian you know what led you to it i think i think i remember you talking at one point that that you had explored rome but you couldn't get in um but but what led you to this whole path and and to discovering obsidium yeah i think um i think it began with uh my master's studies um and then eventually my doctoral studies with the idea of doing research that is very cross and interdisciplinary so i'm forced to just dabble in a lot of disparate areas of research so my primary focus is studies on religion but if you know anything about religion it spans into anthropology sociology and even nowadays with neuroscience so you really need to be familiar with a wide range of literature from various disciplines and industries and at the time i was using google docs which uh this was probably you know five to almost 10 years ago and that felt state of the art because everything was stored in the cloud right in comparison to microsoft word uh google docs you're able to search multiple files at a time but as i was contents and yeah exactly yeah yeah so google docs at first was great um i loved it i could access it on multiple devices but then there was just so much lag because a lot of my text files were just becoming just unruly and just very big and i think the biggest speed sorry sorry to interrupt but even the speed of opening a google doc is painful like you know there's the the weight you click and and you wait and you know exactly so you know the pain like the loading time and the scrolling time all of that just adds up and the other big thing was it was really hard for me to i guess the way i take notes is i take notes based on the particular chapter article or book that i'm reading because i don't want to take things out of context because that is one of the problems methodological problems in um just academia in general but specifically sensitive in my area of work where you just take one quote or one line and you basically misconstrue it and take it out of context and we're gonna get into that more because i know there's a debate in academia of atomic notes versus more integrated and so once we get in what would love to kind of hear your thoughts on on that and we'll we'll get into some zetto costumes sort of thoughts as well from you but but so not just the whole research thing but if i'm not mistaken the fascinating topics that you're getting into religion across all those domains but also in a specific um geographic region if you will of of kind of the whole mediterranean world really is you know so not just not just anthropology and and sociology but even getting into some of the geopolitical types of aspects of that region of that time and and the implications of that exactly so you're just scratching the surface of just how how just uh wide-ranging this can be so um yeah as i was progressing with google docs i have so many documents in google docs uh one thing that came to my attention is the concept of inline tagging and i'm probably dating myself but i thought that that concept would be so useful and robust because again as much as i am taking notes chapter by chapter article by article in these despair fields what actually enables a fresh research and contribution to the field is being able to take some of these seemingly um you know just outlandish ideas and sympathizing exactly synthesizing it in a way where you're creating new interpretations new perspectives and from there you raise new questions and that's where things get really exciting so i was thinking about the concept of inline tagging would be so powerful for google docs um and i guess the closest you could get to that would be linked bookmarks which is not very effective exactly yeah so one of the problems with that was a you still have the problems with speed um and then whenever you make changes um i think those links i'm pretty sure they broke they may have changed that recently but at least from my experience it just wasn't reliable uh so then i looked into things like i probably forget some of the names like microsoft onenote i think they said they had something like tagging at the document level but not inline tagging um and i think maybe there was the option for that but it just wasn't working the way i thought it should work there were some other web-based applications that i was using and again i kind of forget some of their names then i stumbled upon rome where uh with a bi-directional linking i just felt like that made in-line tagging it's almost like inline tagging on steroids yep and that was very attractive to me like you mentioned i wasn't able to gain access by watch a bunch of youtube videos and it really looked so powerful and the potential just seemed just really just unbelievable um but then i was on the wait list and then the rumors of the pricing which you know as somebody in academia it's not like you have that much extra funds so um somehow i forget how i stumbled upon obsidian but i think i was i don't know if it was youtube if it was reddit or just some search form i was looking for rome like exactly and then i stumbled upon obsidian there were some other ones that i thought had similar um feature set but i began with obsidian because the response time was so quick so once i submitted a request for the beta version i got it within a few hours yeah i got a discord invitation and i think the immediate draw was the community um so the i didn't know at the time but it was the developers who welcomed me with this question oh yeah i thought they had like uh like a welcomer like assigned role but she was actually the developer yep um and then i saw like the the feature list the bug list that was um created by the community i saw the interaction i had questions a lot of them were very ignorant um but people were so gracious in responding to them and it was very helpful so the whole um i guess the ethos of discord just really drew me in um and then i guess you know obviously it speaks for itself the application itself was just a delight i mean i was using the application at least 12 hours a day non-stop from the day that i got it till basically now so i don't know when i received the invitation maybe april so it's been almost uh like nine months where i'm basically using it 12 hours a day and it's a delight to use um and especially the fact that you know all of your files are stored locally i still have that backed up but in terms of um performance like it is just blazing fast and when i did have uh access to rome and they actually did grant me a full year of just free service so i'm very thankful for rome and i'm just yeah so i don't want to slight roam in any in any way but as i was using rome side by side just tentatively with obsidian one of the biggest problems was just the performance um with obsidian things were just so much faster and when yeah rome is database based right yeah it's using fire storage using google's database and an obsidian is is file based but i appreciate what you're saying and and your whole journey i had a very similar journey uh where i too was had so many notes in google docs and i was actually using rome and i was one of the the early members of rome contributing to some of the css communities and i'm not a css expert by any stretch but i can i can navigate my way my way through and so um and and i liked rome but when i discovered obsidian actually there's a step in between where um i actually what i didn't like about rome was the performer was the database based and not just because it's database but i preferred to have the files myself and sort of to be able to own my my files and i found myself backing up a lot because in the early days of rome um and by the way i think the developers of rome are superstars just like i believe the developers of obsidian are i mean there's really really talented people but for my needs and what i needed to do you know obsidian was much better but before i discovered obsidium i actually decided to build my own and so i rolled my own system and i built it on top of the the open source quill quill js and and built that and um it was doing every pretty much everything that i wanted to do but every time i wanted to make a change it was you know it was kind of painful and then i saw obsidian and how fast i had seen it in the early days tried it a little bit but how quickly they evolved and then to your point not just the receptivity of the community and the warmth of the community and the the embracing by the community but how receptive the developers are lockhead and silver two what the community is saying what they want what they don't want what they like what they don't like and and just the speed at which patches and the transparency of you know especially with the graphing performance which i don't know if you were around in those days but the the work that they did to improve the performance of the graphing the graphing was was was great to begin with but they made it spectacular in a short period of time and just the work that they do to support the community is just just wonderful so like you um it wasn't just the app it was the community and then i thought why am i wasting my time on my own app just for my own needs when this does 99 of what i want and it's way way better yeah i know i i um yeah my experience has been just has been just so positive it really is a joy to use um like in some ways i feel like i'm gonna miss using obsidian once i'm done my dissertation um which is just weird you know um there'll be more papers yeah yeah there will be more okay so with that jason how about um kind of let's let's jump into screen share and maybe start with um because you you embarked on a if i'm not mistaken it was a three-month three-month research project that you were doing to to publish something and you used obsidian for capturing your notes for linking the notes and for actually writing um your your article in and so maybe just take us from the beginning of how do you capture notes and i'm sure this will start to get us into the atomic note um kind of debate and discussion on that and maybe talk a little bit about your philosophy of note-taking and note linking and how you go about it and of course you know there's no one-size-fits-all you know everyone's got to kind of find their own methodology that works for them but it seems like what you've produced in such a short period of time has been impressive and and we'd all love to learn kind of you know some of your thoughts and some of some of your way of thinking that leads to that sure yeah um i'll be honest my flow is not the most uh structured um so this might require some editing um you might see me kind of fumbling through things but yeah you're right i mean i think the turnaround time with this one particular paper um was just within a few months which is just unheard of in my area where i feel kind of bad even saying this because i think some of my colleagues superiors are going to consider me as a fraud like it only took you a few months that's probably me you're supposed to slave over this yeah yeah we'd like to see yeah go ahead we'd love to see it sure okay so should i just share a screen yeah share screen and and maybe also while you're kind of setting up there what took you into the into your field into your field of research have you always been you know fascinated by by world religion and and these topics is it you know what what drew you to this sure yeah um i think uh on it's interesting because my background is in software development so like i mentioned i also went to drexel so software development religion of course it's a perfect match yeah it's a linear progression um but yeah so i spent about five six years in software development working as a project manager product manager and um in the healthcare industry so very lucrative and it was very fun like conceptually it was just very intriguing but i think part of it was um one is i am i guess you can consider myself a religious person um so there was just that personal aspect of it where it always just struck a huge curiosity in my heart but also i think just more objectively religion is really at a core of so many people's thoughts and ways of living whether or not we grew up in religious traditions especially in the ancient mediterranean period where i think so much of our western civilization whether good or bad whether religious or secular however you want to categorize it it derives from that type of culture um so it's been just a very fascinating thing for me to think you know how did people think back then and how in some ways is very different than the way things are now but in some ways it's so continuous and you see why the world is the way it is um and also you know it's complex so you do have to think about the sociological anthropological ethnographic you know just the list goes down the line i love complexity i think that's probably what drew me to software development to begin with um and then this i think is just you know even more because we're thinking we're talking about humans and we're talking about culture and we're talking about religious systems where the complexities only exponentially multiply totally cool and what's your thesis uh so yeah my thesis is on a particular text written probably in the late first or early second century called the dadake and it's a text that is actually pretty important among both early jewish and christian groups and basically my area or my focus is how has this text um integrate its inherited traditions but at the same time try to innovate those traditions um so yeah very cool uh so let me do a screen share let's see what my obsidian looks like at this point okay so all right here let me um i see red graphite my favorite one of my favorite themes yeah i love it um so whoever made it uh sorry i don't remember your name but thank you so much you know what let me echo that because i've i've thrown so many shouts to kapano for minimal theme which i use and for the i guess is it called andy mode or the the multi-page mode that gordon put together which i love as well but i don't recall the name of who made red graphite and yes like you i i want to throw a shout out there because it's uh yeah definitely one of my favorites yeah so aesthetically pleasing and um you know one of the things about the day is it's very interesting because when i talk about religion as it being so diverse and interdisciplinary uh one of the things about the docu that's really influential is it touches upon so many different rituals and practices so within each ritual for instance prayer fasting almsgiving uh baptism uh communal meal like each one of those topics is there is just a wealth of scholarship in each one of those things so the dadake especially really um it compels you to just um there really are no balance in terms of research and i think that warrants the need for something like a obsidian to be able to capture all those thoughts and being able to come back to it so that you can synthesize some of the material so i guess my folder structure is one thing that i can note um my folder structure is something that i had to come and tinker with over and over again and i know for some of us we're thinking you know i think before you even utilize obsidian you're almost like a deer in the headlights like how should my florida structure be set up uh how should i utilize tags versus back um backlinks for me what i did was i just used obsidian and i just made my research the focus and obsidian is merely a tool to supplement my research so the reason why i emphasize that is because my folder structure has been changing over and over again the way i use tags and backlinks all those things have been modified as my research uh requires me um and that way i was able to focus on what i needed to do instead of being bogged down with some of these particulars cool it makes total sense and i think it's a good a good caution to everyone that you know obsidian as much as we love it it's a tool and and the goal is not to have the most awesome obsidian setup and the most impressive graph although those are nice kind of you know side effects the goal is to produce quality content to extend our thinking to to elaborate our thinking and i would argue the goal even beyond that is to make an impact somehow to to touch lives somehow to make a difference somehow and so i think obsidian can be a great tool for that but it's so easy to get wrapped around the axle of i have to do it this perfect way and keep tinkering with the system and tinkering with the system and tinkering with the system and you spend so much time tinkering and not enough of actually achieving the end goal of making an impact yeah just to reinforce that like not only is obsidian robust enough to handle all those needs but it's flexible enough so that when you do feel like you have to change the folder structure change the way you use tags or backlinks i'm going to show in a second obsidian is flexible enough to adapt to those needs so you're never stuck in some you're never pigeonholed to one way of using it um i guess the way i mean i guess like some of my folders are pretty typical like one is just all my attachments that's pretty straightforward so these are all the images so on and so forth um i really love that feature that they integrated one is all of my authors and you're gonna notice that some of my folders like i mentioned um they're not right i have some things that don't belong there so again that just goes to show that my focus is really on the research than the setup but yeah i have one folder for all the theorists scholars so on and so forth so that for instance um one particular author that i draw on his work many times in this note i have a list of all of his articles books papers chapters that i have either written notes on or things that i know that i need to write notes on later interesting so let me just hit on that for a second even though i'm kind of diving into the deep end a little bit and i'd like to come back to the shallow end in a minute but so rather than allowing jonathan draper to be a a search query that would also show all the links that you've um created you you can manually create a page for this person and manually put in all the links right one of the reasons why i do this is if i ever need to interact with a particular scholar then i have all of his or her works there and then it allows me to just have this view where it's based on scholar by scholar now this is also due to the flexibility of obsidian is if i want the actual thoughts of that particular if i want to interact not based on scholar but based on topic or idea for me that's where i utilize tags so for instance if there is the concept of i don't know ritual or baptism for instance is a very popular one i have that tag so i can easily search um other people's viewpoints that are on the topic of baptism okay cool that's one folder um background is i guess uh you know the cultural background the political background the sociological background of the dadake which can go into a lot of different things like you mentioned there's areas of politics so this is sort of where i store uh literature that is focused not primarily on the deductee but on tangential things that serve to provide a thicker description of that background that's an interesting thing that you did in there of uh pre-pending the year i presume so that you could say show me the most recent research that i've captured yeah that's um that might be something particular to my line of research where the date is so important because unfortunately some scholarship just becomes outdated very quickly in light of new findings or new interpretive theories so the date is really important for me especially when i have let's say draper has um thoughts on a particular topic that he's written in three different articles it would be very helpful for me to just quickly identify what is actually the latest one because his opinion may have been nuanced during that time yep um cool so background daily notes this is an example of i love how obsidian is flexible because for the most part i hardly use daily notes as you can tell there's only six entries or so here i know for other people daily notes is part of the way you do your workflow um for me i'm not like that but there was a moment where i felt really stuck in my research um and i just felt like um yeah i just didn't really know what the next steps were i felt a little drowned and overwhelmed with the amount of literature and during that time i i guess you can tell end of july early august i did resort to daily notes and that helped me tremendously and that really crystallized and able it brought to light some of the focal points and emphases that i needed to focus on instead of being just drowned in the material i think that's a great observation and and i think that can be really helpful using writing as a way or journaling as a way to get unstuck if you will to sort of take what's in our head put it on papers that we can sort of see and especially as a software engineer i come from the engineering background as well as a you know sort of taking it out of our heads if you will and being able to kind of look at it parse it consider it move it around squeeze it synthesize it and it seems to come through a little bit easier than it does all within our heads yeah yeah and um yes i think sometimes i just need to make a list so for instance on this day i just needed a list what did i read so far what are some questions for me to pursue um and within these questions there are so many how can i break it down into categories like rituals socio linguistics um so yeah it was just really helpful um and as you can see i haven't really been doing this since uh this summer um i noticed very soon yeah i'm sorry to interrupt i noticed also that you you pretty much live and work in the editor i don't see you switching to preview mode very much can you talk about that really yeah um hey i think i just got used to it um bi it's funny i think aesthetically i find the editor i don't know if it's this particular theme more pleasing um like yeah i don't know maybe it's the font size or whatever but i just visually speaking i'm able to grab and i don't like having to switch back and forth right um and i got a new keyboard and one of the problems with this new keyboard is sometimes i get the keys mixed up so when i do the hotkey which i have as command e to toggle edit sometimes i hit command w which obviously is closing the note so that's why yeah cool yep now i i i do i i also enjoy writing in the editor mode in red graphite but i do i do switch switch back and forth particularly when i have images i enjoy seeing the images that i've inserted in my notes yeah i will um show you in a second the way i use um backlinks that are where the text and the content is fully displayed and integrated in those cases i definitely use the preview mode cool um so yeah there's a folder called the dadake which again that is just so many different categories there's the ritual of the naked so on and so forth uh one thing that i do that might be helpful for some people who focus on reading monographs or edited volumes is i typically have a folder so for instance this is i should have named this better um an author named jonathan schweibert um back in 2008 and what i do is i create all the chapters as a particular note and i tuck it in this folder and then i have a file that has um it's almost like the table of contents of that particular book so i have for instance this monograph uh i have um how do i break this down so yeah i i flagged the author here jonathan schriebert i have my tags of relevant topics um here is a very informal list again sorry for the messiness um but just an informal list of other literature that i feel like is very relevant that if i'm going to talk about schweibert then i better be sure that i'm familiar with some of this other literature and vice versa so this is just a very um quick list of that um and then i have i guess i can do it in outline view um so this is the outline for this particular note and basically it's the table of contents of this book so uh the book is divided into two parts part one um and then part two and then within each part there are a series of chapters and each chapter where i have is it's a backlink to its own note so that all the notes that i take for that particular chapter is is stored separately but then it's linked back to this so that it's not lost on some type of island um and so the rationale for keeping your notes aligned with the chapter talk a little bit about that versus your notes for the book or versus splitting them out into you know individual notes you talked earlier about the idea of losing context that if i were just to create a note on you know my thoughts on the last supper from schweibert schweibert-schweibert's perspective without it being in the context of the chapter of the book it loses its significance do you want to talk a minute about that um part of it is uh the more immediate reason was a lot of edited volumes in my field and probably other fields as well where there's a volume that is written by a series of authors and each chapter is written by a different author got it got it now now it makes perfect sense okay yeah that was probably the most immediate reason um and then this in a sense each chapter is its own book exactly yeah each chapter has its own argument and within that argument has its own premises so i wanted to um respect the integrity of each argument okay now how about then the whole chapter as a note versus um you know let's let's let's dive into one of those chapters notes sure so um a lot of these are carryovers from google docs so okay here this one nice okay um and then within here uh the way i take notes on a particular chapter article or everything uh so i have oh wow when you said inline tags you weren't kidding yeah yeah um yeah uh so yeah so the basic flow that i have is you know i make sure i link it to the parent literature um i link it to the particular author and then i have page numbers for citation purposes um because again you're gonna have to know the pages for that particular chapter and then i have just tags for that particular file and then i have um the way i write the notes is again i want to respect the integrity of the argument so it's other than the section called abstract all these other sections are basically derived explicitly from the chapter itself um so you know within this chapter if you were to see it you know page 19 to 20 is the introduction page 20 is the oral tradition so on and so forth as you can see and then this way again i really want to just step into the mind of the author and make sure that i'm disciplined in not taking anything out of context so each one of these notes uh basically i just follow the the main argument and the premises of that particular section and i train myself to really do it at a paragraph level sometimes i'm not i'm not as disciplined but at least at the sectional level at least at the chapter level and once i have finished reading the material and i have written all these notes what i do next is a little different um is i go to uh this one global file that i have let me just uh create the view a little bit better uh and the global view the global file that i have is called abstracts and basically uh every single one of the things that i read i write my own abstract if the journal has its own abstract then i copy and paste it but i make sure that i write my own abstract because one of the problems is you read a bunch of things but you forget it and one way to retain what you've read is in your own words how would you create the abstract and what i focus on with the abstract is i guess three things what are the main conclusions what are the main premises that support that conclusion and the third thing is how does this argument intersect with my own research questions and that might be um yeah so the way i create the abstract is um oh boy this is actually a bad example i'm sorry anthony but that's okay okay so what i do is okay so going back to schweibert okay let me um let me pause for a second and let me open the parent file and let me close the abstracts file for now and the way i do this is uh in this chapter files i i write my abstract here and this is my summary of the conclusion premises and then in this more um i use features that are not the way it was intended is i use this code block and this is the way that i can see this research interacting with my research questions and the reason why i put in a code block is because i want it very visible yeah because again i'm i'm spending more than 12 hours on this thing i'm constantly reading text i need something that just jumps out to my eyes and that's the reason for inline tagging highlights and using things in code block so i might forget what this chapter was about most likely i will within a few hours but this code block it allows me to jog my memory of okay this is why it's relevant and this is how i can actually utilize it in my um research i don't think there's any wrong way to use it i think it's cool this is i would say quote block though right it's a quote yes yes yeah so once i have all of my abstracts so i have so if you think about i do this for every chapter so for every chapter and these are all your words this is your own synthesis of what you've read and putting this together and how it correlates with your thesis exactly so then i create an abstract and a list of ways that i can intersect with my research for every chapter and then what i do is i use the backlink feature and i create so let's see here here uh this is chapter two what i have is i have this where i'm pulling in the content of that chapter's notes specifically the abstract section so what ends up happening is if i just create you know this and or if i just toggle to preview mode um i have every chapter here and now i have the corresponding abstract for each chapter so if i ever need to jog my memory for this particular volume not only do i have individual summaries of every chapter but i have a list of the ways that it can actually intersect with my research and and what you're utilizing here is is a wonderful feature of obsidian where you can embed not just another note but you can actually embed a block within the note or a heading within the note which is what the abstract is it's you're pulling in that heading and you can refer to that yes that's cool and the reason why i mentioned oh go ahead go ahead no no go ahead oh the reason why i mentioned that this uh volume is not the best example is because with volumes what i do is i store all the abstracts in the main table of contents page but i'll be honest most of my reading are from discrete art journal articles and for that that's the reason why i have this um what i was trying to show earlier yeah the whole abstracts all of them yeah yeah and then what i do is like so for instance this was a 1968 article that i just read uh earlier today and if i go to layton um so now i have in this in the note for this particular article in the preview mode because i have the section transcluded or embedded yeah exactly yeah that's so cool that feature to be able to do that when you write your abstract jason do you do it at in one go do you do it over time how where are your notes you know deep um are they partial notes or when we look at some you know one of these abstract examples is this you've consumed this and now in one stream of consciousness this all comes out exactly yeah so that's a great point uh what i try to do is when i write the abstract and again it shouldn't be too long it should just be a paragraph because if you really know the material well right and it shouldn't you should be able to make it succinct i try to write it without even looking at the notes um so just off memory can i can i summarize everything that i read in a paragraph and then what i do is once i write this paragraph for instance of this article after i write the paragraph then i i have the side-by-side view and then i check it's almost like i'm quizzing myself and i go through section by section and i try to figure out okay did i miss something or did i miss write something um and then i edit my my abstract i add things i delete things i modify things um and then uh yeah that's basically what i do that's cool what percentage of times with this particular project that we're going through would you say is reading and what percent of time is is writing yeah that's a great question i think because i haven't utilized some of the um like the the ability to plug in for instance um like uh zotero and other options i've been using this i would say 75 of research and reading and the other 25 would be drafts right you know i would say the ability to write drafts that that in itself is like that's so difficult in research and obsidian has helped me and that's a whole nother ballgame where obsidian has provided so much value but i'll be honest once i'm done with the draft because i haven't tinkered with the plugins and again because my focus is on the research not so much on the tool uh i do the actual polishing and the writing in in microsoft word yeah okay um so that's that um do you ever use um the graph feature to look at your connections for your research honestly i i really don't um so my graph view may not be that impressive because i don't really um well it's not a question of impressive it's more a question of do you it doesn't help you um really yeah um i think what has helped me was um for me i love white boarding so when i do have a bunch of ideas main topics i like to create just uh like a web of ideas on my own this to me i think i think the reason being is because my notes are not determined by idea it's by the actual chapter and article and i don't think that makes the back this graph view very um as as helpful and i i was one of the people that have that suggested you know maybe we should have graph view that's based on tags because in my you know even though it's not the most airtight way of doing things uh tags for me are the ideas that can span across various chapters and articles and therefore graph view on tags to me would be more useful um so that's why graph view has never really been although open up your filters for a second so let's because one thing you know first of all i've read yeah well this will show the tags um and and you can filter by tag um in the filter you could say tag colon and type in a tag yeah see if that see if that works do i have to put the uh the number sign i don't i don't know because i don't search on tags try one that has a smaller number of um maybe like baptism or something try it with and without the uh the hash try it with the hash now let's see yeah even that's so bro so enormous um but if you click on one of those i'm gonna guess that like lou 20 2004 on the far right that little yes that one i'm going to guess that has the initiation tag in it somewhere oh that's it oh that's an empty maybe that's a neighbor yeah okay so as you can see i haven't really uh plumbed the depths of the feature-rich list of things that obsidian can do no it's totally cool what i was going to ask is so open up the filter and so something like so i've read a little of carl popper and so i'm curious how popper would link into your so type in popper there let's see and let's see which um you know what files um okay so an interesting thing for me would be okay here's where popper is referenced where is he not referenced that maybe you know he could he could play in so friends so so for instance it would seem a value not just to look at where you know what's in but also what might be missing you know for for a particular line of research so uh i'm curious now it's a total side note you know how popper integrates into your um into some of your your notes some of your abstracts uh do you want me to zoom into uh no no no i just met purely as a as a personal interest intellectual exercise not for um the usage of obsidian more that i'm just fascinated by that but that to me you know one of the things that that i like using obsidian4 and you mentioned this before is finding connections that i wouldn't have found on my own this like serendipitous connections but i don't find them starting with trying to look for a serendipitous connection i find them when i'm looking for something else and following links and all of a sudden it hits me oh this is interesting that yeah this is linked to that through through a few different things and so that that to me is where when i'm linking one of my notes with other notes that's where i get those aha moments that's where it really shines for me yeah um the way i've been able to actually see that come alive is when i've uh so like i mentioned for me tags are the topics that traverse different articles chapters but there are moments where some of these tags not only become so prevalent but becomes something that i need to write on uh that i need to develop on my own and at that point what i do is i actually create a backlink for that tag uh let me see if i have an example it might be under my miscellaneous got it ah folder where okay so this might be uh hopefully this isn't a bad example uh sociolinguistics okay i think this might was this ever a tag let me just double check sorry no it wasn't i thought it was uh give me a second okay maybe innovation innovation is a theory or not so much a theory but an insight or concept that i heavily rely on for my dissertation and i'm pretty sure innovation was okay yeah so it was i think it was originally attacked um well yeah so originally it was a tag and um basically i'm looking for instances where despite the fact that in the ancient mediterranean most people were very conservative and anything innovative was considered um was looked with much suspicion right um so i'm looking for people are still innovating they just do it in more subtle sophisticated ways so every time i see an instance i tag innovation attacking innovation but then there came a point where i realized you know what i think this can become its own insight topic that i need to write upon and this is actually one of the theories that i'm utilizing for my dissertation so why i ended up doing was i ended up creating a backlink for innovation and here i have um a list of of uh you know theory and methodology how would i actually write a theory on innovation um and then you know this is a little section on synthesis so i have um i guess one group is rituals the idea that rituals are always changing lends itself to the idea of innovation um then i have the idea that changes are often based on community and the need for a group of people to have a sense of communal identity so and then here's a body of literature that speaks to that um that i create a list of and then um you know to do these are some scholars or books that i i definitely need to look into uh it's been a while since i looked at this so just forgive me for a second um oh it's totally cool one question related to this though yeah is how do you dis so now speaking to your overall workflow so this this is seems like a fascinating topic and one very worthy of of writing on or at least thinking on how do you decide what you're going to work on where you're going to work on or does this sit here until you kind of stumble on and say you know what today this looks like an interesting thing that i'm gonna work on yeah um this is where uh one of the problems with uh ancient mediterranean is you don't have that much data like there aren't that many texts like for instance if i was a historian on let's say the 17th century the wealth of information is just just incomparable so the thing about the ancient mediterranean is because there's not much data there aren't too many fresh perspectives because so much scholarship has like eeked out every line of writing that is excellent that's available so i think one of the ways that i figure out what is a topic for me to write upon is whenever i come across a text or an interpretation that i think can actually be more convincingly interpreted based on recent theories or insight that is one um so i always look for those type of potential opportunities and whenever i read through the primary data as well as the secondary literature if there's a question that comes up and i feel like nobody's answered then that is also a huge opportunity because again in this area of discipline so much has already been written on so you're really like you're almost like um just yeah you're looking for scraps almost right got it how about how you pulled all you know the the project you you published um back in november um i think it was or december time frame how did you synthesize pull everything together what was the process you went through that's that's a great one too and at the time my folder structure was completely different um so let me see if i can kind of go back in time um but basically there were certain files that really helped me with that well you write in greek too oh yeah so you know greek german uh yeah my journey is pretty weak french is even weaker but yeah greek is my primary i mean other than english greek is sort of a go-to expert language um hebrew as well just because a lot of early jewish literature early christian obviously they're interacting with human resources a little not too much latin but yeah mostly greek and then a lot of scholarship um were done by germans so so i created this table of contents for my dissertation um and this is you know very generic this is going to be modified nuanced like considerably but you got to start with something so you know typically introduction methodology the two main sections are canonical traditions ritual prescriptions and then you wrap it up with a conclusion um and then here are just some miscellaneous notes and what i do here is i haven't worked on my drafts via obsidian on anything other than i guess ritual prescriptions so if i click here maybe i'll create a new pane yeah so good okay so there is another file there let me do a side by side the view will be a little bit better [Music] and here i think these are something else okay so here i have it linked back to you know my table of contents it's related to the canonical traditions section which you know it's is tagged here and then i have uh a dadake ritual brainstorm file that that's been a working file that i've been using for a long time um let me see what this looks like and this is this is really rough um and this is something that i've just been adding on to over time um and these are just some thoughts that came up um and eventually uh it wasn't structured or organized well enough for it to be its own standalone file so that's why i just have it linked in case i just don't want to lose it yep and then ritual and deduct a outline okay so here now let me just make this a little bit bigger okay so here what i have is let me create let me show you the outline view um so in this outline view uh the main there are basically one section of my dissertation is um analyzing all the rituals that are found in this document like i mentioned earlier there are many uh i counted 10 and within each of these rituals i'm gonna have to read all the literature that's even if it's tangentially related on it and then i have to write something that is a original contribution to scholarship so each one of these will become either a chat not a chapter but probably a section um of my dissertation and i've done one on baptism but i just haven't integrated the notes that's the uh the publication that's forthcoming is i did it for baptism so that's cool other than a few things i need to refine it's in the bag and i'm very thankful for that what i've been working on these days is giving almsgiving or charity and here as you can see in the other sections i haven't fleshed it out yet but here i have so i have uh i have the text of let me just make this a little bit bigger i have the text that i'm working with so you know giving isn't scattered throughout the day it's it's restricted to uh you know chapter one versus four b to six in chapter four verse five to eight um and and these in these texts and what i do is i i put in the greek here because i want to be able to just when i'm working on it it'd be great for me to just focus everything on obsidian and then you know within the text i have lexical entries for each one um and then this can get a little nerdy but you know this is what i what i do is you know whenever other scholars have written on a particular word then i actually have um you know yeah so i can just take a look at this and this or maybe this is reference somewhere else um i forget what these references mean but basically you have that uh ability to be able to do those type of references and then commentary so this i think that hover feature by the way is so powerful oh my goodness yes i love that yeah i wish you could just snap it like i wish you could just take this and just snap it and make it into a paint or something like that but yeah i love the hover feature and then i have a section for commentary because not only do i have to know well you can't you can make it into a pane just by clicking the link right right yeah but but i mean i'm sorry by dragging the link oh okay if you drag that link to the top of uh switch to preview mode i think you have to be in i see nice okay that's nice so yeah like i have a commentary this is where you know verse by verse all the different scholars have written on this verse uh i jot it down by verse so these are all links um and then i have uh a section on scholarship and this is more of um not so much verse by verse but anything that pertains to giving um i have it here and uh this was a to do so this was this list here was what i had known before i began researching so that this only consists of two works this guy here and this guy here and i had a to-do list and you know my bibliography grew exponentially uh and as you can tell like there's so many the pieces of literature and then basically after i read it i have a sentence i have the abstract of course like i mentioned earlier but i have just like a quick is this relevant yes yep irrelevant yes because so much is going through my mind um this one is particularly relevant and that's why i have a bunch of bullet points i couldn't just say relevant um like is this good for theory and methodology so i have all these different things here um i do have a i do have a tag called star and that's sort of from my google days things that i should definitely look at next uh i think i finished all those so that's cool um so yeah and then i have uh from here primary sources so these are all the primary ancient literature um this i updated considerably so this is a list that has been outdated and obsolete and i'll show you where i ended up updating so originally i had all of my notes in this ritual prescriptions layout and this again goes to the flexibility of obsidian i realized it was becoming unruly because again if you think about if i create this amount of text for each section and there's 10 sections this file is going to be unruly so what i ended up doing was i created a giving um notes right so from here this is where a lot of those sections i mentioned i copied over here and that's why i base and these are updated here now yeah so for instance um the commentary so i was wondering where all my notes went because my commentary section is much longer so as you can tell in comparison to the other one um this is much lengthier because this is where i've been doing all of my updates um and then what i originally did was i had a section on giving scholarship that now i created this into its own uh note as well originally it was here and this is where you know i have all the scholars that i mentioned earlier so this is your version of atomicity yeah and then my primary sources that short list i expanded it considerably here i mean this is probably the longest note and then what i do was i created a synthesis where i'm jotting down big ideas patterns gaps questions that continually come up um and i did this iteratively so i had my initial thoughts and then i had another thought specifically on the primary sources and then my new thoughts yep and then from here i have another backlink with the giving draft and this is where um my giving draft this is where it starts to come together yeah and then you know if i have it side by side with with this thing right here then it's you know i i know where all the material is and all the backlinks are there um the page numbers everything is already there and let me see what i can do in terms of let me just do the outline view this way yeah so i have an introduction um compositional dimension and then within each one of these i have let's see if i have yeah i have many subsections and uh yeah this is awesome so so you've submitted your your chapter no i i i have the draft complete um i wanted to read a few other articles just to make sure i'm not overlooking anything but i'm hoping to submit it later tonight wow that's pretty cool yeah so i guess the turnaround time from my last article which i think i wrapped it up in december or something okay yeah this section or chapter again is another three months and you know my supervisor might grill me and say you forgot this body of literature or whatever but at least with obsidian everything that i've read it's here and it's like i can easily find the exact page numbers citations everything very cool so i feel like in many ways i'm just scratching the surface of what obsidian can offer even though you say that you're just scratching the surface you are it's impressive what you put together and it's also inspirational i think um it's it's really cool and and i think a lot of people are in academia who at least on the discord servers and have an interest in using obsidian um whether it's for producing papers or just helping them through their studies but um it's uh it's really cool what you put together and um and i really appreciate you taking the time today to share share some of that with us and and i can't wait to see what you produce in the future not only is it really fascinating how you're using obsidian but your personal interests and your desire to to touch lives and make a difference i really appreciate that so thank you for your research and thank you for all that you're doing jason it's really cool no thank you and uh thank you for giving me the opportunity to share and your questions were really helpful um and being able to just organize this i guess one thing you might sense is organization is not the my forte but because of obsidian and its flexibility you're able to i'm able to pull it off so thank you for those questions cool

Channel: Anthony's Desk

Views: 21,192

Keywords:

Id: P3Hlo1DMdQQ

Length: 62min 33sec (3753 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 23 2021