https://github.com/deathau/obsidian-snippets

Some code and clever hacks for Obsidian

This is a great question and I ask it frequently with many different answers.

I've not seen specific numbers, but I suspect that the majority of Hypothes.is users are annotating in small private groups/classes using their learning management system (LMS) integrations through their university. As a result, using it and hoping for a big social experience is going to be discouraging for most.

Of course this doesn't mean that no one is out there. After all, here you are following my RSS feed of annotations and asking these questions!

I'd say that 95+% or more of my annotations are ultimately for my own learning and ends. If others stumble upon them and find them interesting, then great! But I'm not really here for them.

As more people have begun using Hypothes.is over the past few years I have slowly but surely run into people hiding in the margins of texts and quietly interacted with them and begun to know some of them. Often they're also on Twitter or have their own websites too which only adds to the social glue. It has been one of the slowest social media experiences I've ever had (even in comparison to old school blogging where discovery is much higher in general use). There has been a small uptick (anecdotally) in Hypothes.is use by some in the note taking application space (Obsidian, Roam Research, Logseq, etc.), so I've seen some of them from time to time.

I can only think of one time in the last five or so years in which I happened to be "in a text" and a total stranger was coincidentally reading and annotating at the same time. There have been a few times I've specifically been in a shared text with a small group annotating simultaneously. Other than this it's all been asynchronous experiences.

There are a few people working at some of the social side of Hypothes.is if you're searching for it, though even their Hypothes.is presences may seem as sparse as your own at present @tonz.

Some examples:

@peterhagen Has built an alternate interface for the main Hypothes.is feed that adds some additional discovery dimensions you might find interesting. It highlights some frequent annotators and provide a more visual feed of what's happening on the public Hypothes.is timeline as well as data from HackerNews.

@flancian maintains anagora.org, which is like a planet of wikis and related applications, where he keeps a list of annotations on Hypothes.is by members of the collective at https://anagora.org/latest

@tomcritchlow has experimented with using Hypothes.is as a "traditional" comments section on his personal website.

@remikalir has a nice little tool https://crowdlaaers.org/ for looking at documents with lots of annotations.

Right now, I'm also in an Obsidian-based book club run by Dan Allosso in which some of us are actively annotating the two books using Hypothes.is and dovetailing some of this with activity in a shared Obsidian vault. see: https://boffosocko.com/2022/03/24/55803196/. While there is a small private group for our annotations a few of us are still annotating the books in public. Perhaps if I had a group of people who were heavily interested in keeping a group going on a regular basis, I might find the value in it, but until then public is better and I'm more likely to come across and see more of what's happening out there.

I've got a collection of odd Hypothes.is related quirks, off label use cases, and experiments: https://boffosocko.com/tag/hypothes.is/ including a list of those I frequently follow: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Hypothesis%20Feeds

Like good annotations and notes, you've got to put some work into finding the social portion what's happening in this fun little space. My best recommendation to find your "tribe" is to do some targeted tag searches in their search box to see who's annotating things in which you're interested.

To a great extent, Hypothes.is has such a small footprint of users (in comparison to massive platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc.) that it's never been a performative platform for me. As a design choice they have specifically kept their social media functionalities very sparse, so one also doesn't generally encounter the toxic elements that are rampant in other locations. This helps immensely. I might likely change my tune if it were ever to hit larger scales or experienced the Eternal September effect.

Beyond this, I mostly endeavor to write things for later re-use. As a result I'm trying to write as clearly as possible in full sentences and explain things as best I can so that my future self doesn't need to do heavy work or lifting to recreate the context or do heavy editing. Writing notes in public and knowing that others might read these ideas does hold my feet to the fire in this respect. Half-formed thoughts are often shaky and unclear both to me and to others and really do no one any good. In personal experience they also tend not to be revisited and revised or revised as well as I would have done the first time around (in public or otherwise).

Occasionally I'll be in a rush reading something and not have time for more detailed notes in which case I'll do my best to get the broad gist knowing that later in the day or at least within the week, I'll revisit the notes in my own spaces and heavily elaborate on them. I've been endeavoring to stay away from this bad habit though as it's just kicking the can down the road and not getting the work done that I ultimately want to have. Usually when I'm being fast/lazy, my notes will revert to highlighting and tagging sections of material that are straightforward facts that I'll only be reframing into my own words at a later date for reuse. If it's an original though or comment or link to something important, I'll go all in and put in the actual work right now. Doing it later has generally been a recipe for disaster in my experience.

There have been a few instances where a half-formed thought does get seen and called out. Or it's a thought which I have significantly more personal context for and that is only reflected in the body of my other notes, but isn't apparent in the public version. Usually these provide some additional insight which I hadn't had that makes the overall enterprise more interesting. Here's a recent example, albeit on a private document, but which I think still has enough context to be reasonably clear: https://hypothes.is/a/vmmw4KPmEeyvf7NWphRiMw

There may also be infrequent articles online which are heavily annotated and which I'm excerpting ideas to be reused later. In these cases I may highlight and rewrite them in my own words for later use in a piece, but I'll make them private or put them in a private group as they don't add any value to the original article or potential conversation though they do add significant value to my collection as "literature notes" for immediate reuse somewhere in the future. On broadly unannotated documents, I'll leave these literature notes public as a means of modeling the practice for others, though without the suggestion of how they would be (re-)used for.

All this being said, I will very rarely annotate things privately or in a private group if they're of a very sensitive cultural nature or personal in manner. My current set up with Hypothesidian still allows me to import these notes into Obsidian with my API key. In practice these tend to be incredibly rare for me and may only occur a handful of times in a year.

Generally my intention is that ultimately all of my notes get published in something in a final form somewhere, so I'm really only frontloading the work into the notes now to make the writing/editing process easier later.

Where

My annotations broadly flow into two spaces:

Obsidian

My private Obsidian-based vault is where I collect the notes and actively work on, modify, edit, and expand them if and when necessary. This is also the space where I'm broadly attempting to densely interlink them together for future use and publication in other venues. If I could, I would publish these all on the web, but I've yet to find a set up with a low enough admin tax that I can publish them inexpensively in a way I'd like them to appear (primarily with properly linked [[WikiLinks]]) while still owning them in my own space.

I've been experimenting around with using Blot.im as a solution to display them here https://notes.boffosocko.com/, but at present it's a very limited selection of my extant notes and doesn't include Webmention or other niceties I'd like to add. As it's a very alpha stage experiment I don't recommend anyone follow or use it and it may disappear altogether in the coming months.

WordPress

My main website uses WordPress. To a great extent, this is (now) primarily a back up location and the majority of the annotations are unpublished to the public, but are searchable to me on the back end.

I do, however, use it occasionally for quickly publishing and syndicating select annotations which I think others may find interesting or upon which I'm looking for comments/feedback and don't expect that the audience I'd like these from will find them natively on Hypothes.is' platform. An example of this might be a paper I was reading this weekend on Roland Barthes which discusses his reasonably well documented zettelkasten-like note taking practice. The article can be found here: https://culturemachine.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/373-604-1-PB.pdf with the annotations seen here: https://docdrop.org/pdf/The-Card-Index-as-Creativity-Ma---Wilken-Rowan-upq8g.pdf/. To tip off others in the space, I made a post on my site with a bit of a puzzle and syndicated it to Twitter. A few hours later I posted a follow up with some additional details and links to my notes on hypothesis which got some useful feedback from Matthias Melcher on the Barthes paper as well as on a related paper I mentioned by Luhmann, particularly about German translation, with which I have little facility.

Another recent illustrative example was this annotation on the Library of Congress website about Vladimir Nabokov which was picked up by my website (though unpublished/not public) but which I syndicated to Twitter primarily to be able to send a notification to Eleanor Konik who I know is interested in the idea of World Building using historical facts and uses Obsidian in her work. (The @mention in the tweet is hiding in the image of the index card so that I could save text space in the main tweet.) Several others interested in note taking and zettelkasten for writing also noticed it and "liked" it. Not being on Hypothes.is to my knowledge much less following me there, neither Eleanor nor the others would have seen it without the Tweet.

Nabokov used index cards for his research & writing. In one index card for Lolita, he creates a "weight-heigh-age table for girls of school age" to be able to specify Lolita's measurements. He also researched the Colt catalog of 1940. #WorldBuildinghttps://t.co/i16Yc7CbJ8 pic.twitter.com/JSjXV50L3M

— Chris Aldrich (@ChrisAldrich) April 10, 2022

How

Obsidian

Getting annotations from Hypothes.is to Obsidian is a short two-step process which is reasonably well automated so that I don't spend a lot of time cutting/pasting/formatting.

I start with an IFTTT recipe that takes the RSS output of Hypothes.is and creates text files directly into my Obsidian vault. The results are quite rudimentary and only include the title of the document, the permalink of the Hypothes.is post, the highlighted text, and my annotation. It doesn't include the tags as RSS doesn't have a specification for these.

Second, I've set up Hypothesidian which has a much higher fidelity dovetail with the Hypothes.is API to get all the data and even the formatting set up I'm looking for. A reasonably well laid out set of instructions with a low/no code approach for it can be found at https://forum.obsidian.md/t/retrieve-annotations-for-hypothes-is-via-templater-plugin-hypothes-idian/17225. It allows importing annotations by a variety of methods including by date and by document URL. I've also made a small modification to it so that tags on Hypothes.is are turned into [[wikilinks]] in Obsidian instead of #tags which I only use sparingly.

All the IFTTT annotations will be ported individually into a specific Obsidian folder where I'll process them. I can then quickly use Hypothesidian to import the properly laid out version (using templates) of the notes with just a few keystrokes and then focus my time on revising my notes if necessary and then linking them to the appropriate notes already in my system. Finally I'll move them into the appropriate folder based on their content—typically one of the following: zettelkasten, wiki, commonplace, dictionary, or sources (for bibliographic use). Careful watchers will notice that I often use Hypothes.is' "page notes" functionality to create a bookmark-like annotation into which I will frequently post the URL of the page and occasionally a summary of a piece, these are imported into my system and are used as source/bibliographic information. I also have some dovetailing with Zotero as a bibliographic set up which feeds into this data as well.

This version which I've cobbled together works well for me so that I'm not missing anything, but there are definitely other similar processes available out there both for Obsidian (with plugins or scripts) as well as for other platforms. If I'm not mistaken, I think Readwise (a paid solution) has a set up for note transfer and formatting.

WordPress

As there isn't an extant Micropub client for Hypothes.is I initially used RSS as a transport layer to get my notes from Hypothes.is into WordPress. The fidelity isn't great in part because RSS doesn't include any tags. To get some slightly better presentation I set up a workflow using RSS output from Hypothes.is as input into an IFTTT workflow which outputs to a webhook that stands in as a Micropub client targeting my websites Micropub server. Some of the display on my site is assisted by using the Post Kinds plugin, which I know you've been working around yourself. The details may be above some, but I've outlined most of the broad strokes of how this is done in a tutorial at https://boffosocko.com/2020/01/21/using-ifttt-to-syndicate-pesos-content-from-social-services-to-wordpress-using-micropub/. In that example, I use the service Pocket as an example, but Hypothes.is specific information could easily be swapped out on a 1-1 basis.

A custom stand-alone or even an integrated micropub client for Hypothes.is would be a fantastic project if someone wanted to dig into the details and dovetail it with the Hypothes.is API.

Why

Ideally, I'm hoping that small pieces loosely joined and IndieWeb building blocks will allow me to use the tools and have the patterns I'm looking for, without a lot of work, so that I can easily make annotations with Hypothes.is but have and share (POSSE) my content on my own site in a way that works much the way many IndieWeb sites dovetail with Twitter or Mastodon.

I'm doing some portions of it manually at present, without a lot of overhead, but it would be fun to see someone add micropub and webmention capabilities to Hypothes.is or other IndieWeb building blocks. (I suspect it won't be Hypothes.is themselves as their team is very small and they're already spread thin on multiple other mission critical projects.)

In the end, I'm using Hypothes.is as a well designed and convenient tool for quickly making notes on digital documents. All the data is flowing to one of two other locations where I'm actually making use of it. While there is some social layer there, I'm getting email notifications through the Hypothes.is settings and the data from my responses just gets rolled back into my spaces which I try to keep open and IndieWeb friendly by default. At the same time, for those who want or need it, Hypothes.is' interface is a great way of reading, searching, sorting, and interacting with my notes in public, particularly until I get something specific and user friendly up to do it on my own domain.

In addition to using his card index for producing his published works, Barthes also used his note taking system for teaching as well. His final course on the topic of the Neutral, which he taught as a seminar at Collège de France, was contained in four bundles consisting of 800 cards which contained everything from notes, summaries, figures, and bibliographic entries.

Given this and the easy portability of index cards, should we instead of recommending notebooks, laptops, or systems like Cornell notes, recommend students take notes directly on their note cards and revise them from there? The physicality of the medium may also have other benefits in terms of touch, smell, use of colors on them, etc. for memory and easy regular use. They could also be used physically for spaced repetition relatively quickly.

Teachers using their index cards of notes physically in class or in discussions has the benefit of modeling the sort of note taking behaviors we might ask of our students. Imagine a classroom that has access to a teacher's public notes (electronic perhaps) which could be searched and cross linked by the students in real-time. This would also allow students to go beyond the immediate topic at hand, but see how that topic may dovetail with the teachers' other research work and interests. This also gives greater meaning to introductory coursework to allow students to see how it underpins other related and advanced intellectual endeavors and invites the student into those spaces as well. This sort of practice could bring to bear the full weight of the literacy space which we center in Western culture, for compare this with the primarily oral interactions that most teachers have with students. It's only in a small subset of suggested or required readings that students can use for leveraging the knowledge of their teachers while all the remainder of the interactions focus on conversation with the instructor and questions that they might put to them. With access to a teacher's card index, they would have so much more as they might also query that separately without making demands of time and attention to their professors. Even if answers aren't immediately forthcoming from the file, then there might at least be bibliographic entries that could be useful.

I recently had the experience of asking a colleague for some basic references about the history and culture of the ancient Near East. Knowing that he had some significant expertise in the space, it would have been easier to query his proverbial card index for the lived experience and references than to bother him with the burden of doing work to pull them up.

What sorts of digital systems could help to center these practices? Hypothes.is quickly comes to mind, though many teachers and even students will prefer to keep their notes private and not public where they're searchable.

Another potential pathway here are systems like FedWiki or anagora.org which provide shared and interlinked note spaces. Have any educators attempted to use these for coursework? The closest I've seen recently are public groups using shared Roam Research or Obsidian-based collections for book clubs.

https://collignon.github.io/2021/02/hypothesis-with-obsidian/

Nicolas Collignon has a python script for exporting Hypothes.is annotations into Obsidian: https://github.com/collignon/annotation-tools

https://movement-ontology.brandazzle.net/docs/introduction/#how-do-i-use-it

Built using Markdown text files and PDFs using Obsidian, versioned through GitHub, and connected to a website through Netlify and Peter Yuen's Zola site project.

See also: https://github.com/ppeetteerrs/obsidian-zola

https://github.com/stefanopagliari/bibnotes

This plugin generates literaure notes from the source stored in your Zotero library, including both the metadata and the annotations that are stored within Zotero (extracted using the native PDF Reader or the Zotfile plugin). The settings of the plugin provide different tools to customize the format of the literature notes, as well as to perform different transformations to the text of the annotations.

See also: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/bibnotes-formatter-new-plugin-to-export-and-format-annotations-from-zotero-into-obsidian/29920

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/zotero-zotfile-mdnotes-obsidian-dataview-workflow/15536

This doesn't work in the new Zotero v6, but the new version does something roughly similar and has a built in .pdf viewer and imports annotations.

https://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-6/

Starting in version 6, Zotero will allow you to view annotations previously made in Adobe software. It will also let one extract all the annotations from within a text and save them into a note in Zotero and then export them as markdown into Obsidian or other tools.

The work to add this particular feature to the plugin may be quite a lot, but for those who want it in the erstwhile and for the developers as an example, one might try looking at https://forum.obsidian.md/t/zotero-zotfile-mdnotes-obsidian-dataview-workflow/15536.

Brandon,

Obsidian Annotator (https://github.com/elias-sundqvist/obsidian-annotator), which I'm presuming you're using, looks like it's working from within Obsidian instead of a web page and is very clever looking, but without some significant work, I don't think it's going to provide you with the results you're looking for. It sounds like you want an all-public chain of work and Obsidian Annotator currently defaults to an all-private chain.

From my brief perusal of what's going on, the plugin appears to be tied to a single Hypothes.is account (likely the developer's) which defaults all annotations to private (only you) and as a result, even if you had the permalink to the annotations you'd not be able to see them presented on the web as they're all private and you wouldn't have access to the account. You could try filing some issues on the related Github repository to see if the developer might add the ability to make public annotations using your own personal account, which I'm sure would require your personal API key for Hypothes.is to be put into the settings page for the plugin in Obsidian. Another issue I see is that it's taking Hypothesis tags and turning them into Obsidian tags, which is generally fine, but the developer isn't accounting for multi-word tags which is creating unintended tag errors along the way that will need to be manually fixed.

If you're open to an alternate method of annotating and doing so in public, I can recommend a workflow that will allow you to do what it sounds like you're attempting. It starts with annotating .pdf files (either on the web, or as local files in your browser) in public using your own Hypothes.is account. (Most of this also works with private annotations, but if you want them to appear on public versions of web-hosted .pdf files with the same fingerprints, you'll want them to be public so others can see/interact with them.) Next set up the Hypothesidian script described here: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/retrieve-annotations-for-hypothes-is-via-templater-plugin-hypothes-idian/17225. There are some useful hints further down the thread on that page, so read the whole thing. The Github repository for it is here: https://github.com/SilentVoid13/Templater/discussions/191 if you need it. I've documented a few modifications I've made to the built-in template to suit my particular needs and which might serve as a template if you find it useful: https://boffosocko.com/2021/07/08/hypothes-is-obsidian-hypothesidian-for-easier-note-taking-and-formatting/.

You can then use the functionality of Hypothesidian to pull in the annotations you want (by day, by document, only your annotations, all the annotations on a document, etc.) For .pdf files, you may require Jon Udell's facet tool https://jonudell.info/h/facet/ to search your personal account for the name of the file or one of the tags you used. When you find it, you can click on it and it will open a new browser window that contains the appropriate urn file "key" you'll need to put into Hypothesidian to grab the annotations from a particular .pdf file. It will be in the general form: urn:x-pdf:1234abcd5678efgh9101112ijkl13. I haven't found an easier means of pulling out the URN/fingerprint of pdf files, though others may have ideas.

When you pull in your annotations you can also get/find permalinks to the annotations on the web if you like. I usually hide mine in the footnotes of pages with the labels "annotation in situ" and "syndication links", a habit I've picked up from the IndieWeb community (https://indieweb.org/posts-elsewhere). You can see a sample of how this might be done at https://notes.boffosocko.com/where-are-the-empty-spaces-on-the-internet where I've been doing some small scale Hypothes.is/Obsidian/Web experiments. (I'm currently using Blot.im to get [[wikilinks]] to resolve.)

Another strong option you're probably looking for is to use "via" links (https://web.hypothes.is/blog/meetvia/) on the URLs for your pdf files so that people can automatically see the annotation layer. (This may require whitelisting on Hypothes.is' end depending on where the files are hosted; alternately https://docdrop.org/ may be useful here.) Then if you've annotated those publicly, they'll also be able to see them that way too.

Another side benefit of this method is that it doesn't require the Data View plugin for Obsidian to render your annotations within Obsidian which also means you'll have cleaner looking pages of annotations in your web published versions. (ie. none of the %% code blocks which don't render properly on the web)

As I notice you're using some scanned .pdf files which often don't have proper OCR and can make creating annotations with appropriate Hypothes.is anchors, you might also appreciate the functionality of docdrop for this as well.

Given your reliance on documents and the fact that you've annotated some in what looks like Adobe Acrobat or a similar .pdf program, you might additionally enjoy using Zotero with Obsidian, Zotfile, and mdnotes as outlined here: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/zotero-zotfile-mdnotes-obsidian-dataview-workflow/15536. It's relatively slick, but requires additional set up, reliance on more moving pieces, and isn't as nice an overall user interface in comparison to Hypothes.is. It also misses all of the potential useful social annotation you might get with Hypothes.is.

Hopefully this is all reasonably clear and helpful. I'd be interested in hearing about options from others who are using Hypothes.is in conjunction with Obsidian or other related note taking tools and publishing them to the web after-the-fact.

Best, Chris Aldrich

https://github.com/reuseman/flashcards-obsidian

https://github.com/wxxedu/obsidianki4

This also looks like this is either on pause or generally unsupported. Caveat emptor.

Additional details: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/620260832

https://github.com/Pseudonium/Obsidian_to_Anki

Looks to be unsupported thought.

Additional details: - https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-to-anki-v3-4-0-a-feature-rich-plugin-that-allows-you-to-add-notes-from-obsidian-to-anki/5030/160 - https://santiyounger.com/obsidian-anki

• idea for glossary

When will I need Dataview plugin

Nice to see someone speaking so joyously about annotations. :) Looks like you've got a heavier analog version of the digital version of what I'm doing. I often use Kindle hightlights/annotations and then import them to Obsidian. Alternately I use Hypothes.is on online .pdf copies and then use Hypothesidian (https://forum.obsidian.md/t/retrieve-annotations-for-hypothes-is-via-templater-plugin-hypothes-idian/17225) to import all my digital notes into Obsidian. I love being able to keep the original context of the text close for either creating literature notes or expanding fleeting notes into permanent ones. When I am in a more analog mode (who doesn't love the feel of a nice fountain pen on paper?) I have a method for doing optical character recognition on my handwritten notes to save the time of typing them out again: https://boffosocko.com/2021/12/20/55799844/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvke-vriQbY

Morgan Eua talks about her active reading practice for fiction and non-fiction and how she transcribes her notes into Obsidian.

Obsidian for thematic analysis

what happens in the system when I start obsidian

Information-Message-Word-Concept-Knowledge-Mind architecture

My obsidian Philosophy resonated resurfaced

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Gordon Brander</span> in "Slouching toward Xanadu: a roundup of block reference mechanisms https://t.co/CxSm0bZjHu" (<time class='dt-published'>02/24/2022 17:12:12</time>)</cite></small>

Discussion of some prior art leading up to Google's text fragment links.

Wouter Groeneveld here is mixing up a digital garden and a blog with social media enhancements. I personally wouldn't expect a digital garden to necessarily have features like checkins, bookmarks, etc. Ideally it would be a mix of of a zettelkasten with atomic ideas and notes and a wiki structure with somewhat longer articles and ideas strung together.

From this definition, my personal website definitely isn't a "digital garden" but a blog with a variety of social media features built in. Looking at some smaller subsets of my website, one might consider it to be a digital garden.

An additional piece of digital gardening also has to do with actually tending the garden, which I generally don't do in my website the way I do in my Obsidian vault. My vault is more like a digital garden which has many streams of data coming into it and being regularly tended.

This is another example of the broader space of these ideas being mixed together in a hodgepodge without clear definitions of what each are.

This would be a useful plugin for freely publishing Obsidian content via Git, except for this problem. I depend on whitespace in filenames. Pity.

https://github.com/caronchen/obsidian-calibre-plugin

Note taking system as second brain (exobrain) is externalism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N02UyrTQJo&t=2s

https://gingkowriter.com/

This looks like an interesting tool for moving from notes to an outline to a written document. Could be interesting for dovetailing with a zettelkasten.

How to move data from something like Obsidian to Ginko Writer though?

Backlinks

*fleeting notes

https://learningaloud.com/blog/2021/12/16/creating-storing-and-using-smart-notes/

Brief overview of Sonke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes with some ideas about using Zotero and Obsidian for note taking.

This plugin adds two new views to Obsidian, the breadcrumb matrix/list view, and the breadcrumbs trail view. The wiki has more in-depth info on the plugin than the readme.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Eleanor Konik</span> in 2021-07-24: Showcases, Link Cards, & Better Tablet Toolbars (<time class='dt-published'>07/29/2021 12:14:15</time>)</cite></small>

https://github.com/akaalias/obsidian-journey-plugin

Discover the story between your notes in Obsidian

https://github.com/SkepticMystic/graph-analysis

Analyse the structure of your Obsidian graph using various analysis techniques

https://www.obsidianroundup.org/ite-not-second-brain/

Eleanor Konik describes why second brain is a terrible term for note taking apps.

At what point could digital tools be said to be thinking? Do they need to be generative? It certainly needs to be on the other side of serendipitously juxtaposing two interesting ideas. One can juxtapose millions of ideas, it's the selection of a tiny subset of these as "better" or more interesting than the others and then building off of that that constitutes this sort of generative thought.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19_QNqBQ6LE

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/end-of-book-club-and-whats-next

I could be all in on Debt: The First 5000 years!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ydqjJiQ4zs

Dan Allosso looks at the graph view of his Obsidian vault in an attempt to clean up orphaned notes and connect them into his larger knowledge base.

He uses a clever Kuiper belt comet analogy to describe bringing these notes into his his solar system.

HITS Centrality algorithm

• the currently focused note is in bold format in the list.
• I think it lists the main overlinked (overcited) note in the vault

Centrality algorithms

Graph analysis

Similarity algorithm

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/three-basic-elements-of-taking-notes

Allosso outlines a bit about how he dovetails Research Rabbit (discovery), Obsidian (writing, linking), and Zotero (citations, reading).

https://github.com/adithyabsk/tftbot

A Twitter bot that will tweet out data from your PMK tools. Presumably this is for spaced repetition or a goal towards creating combinatorial creativity.

https://www.goedel.io/p/tft-performance-obsidian

https://github.com/lynchjames/obsidian-day-planner

Looks interesting, but I'll resist trying it out.

https://github.com/shabegom/obsidian-reminders

This plugin also does reminders for Obsisian, but doesn't look very well supported and hasn't been updated in a while. Not sure I like the general format as much as the other version in any case.

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/reminders-in-obsidian/8850

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/to-dos-with-reminders/884/21

I want this and apparently there are a couple of plugins:

• https://github.com/uphy/obsidian-reminder
• https://github.com/trashhalo/obsidian-todo-txt (archived on Github, so possibly inactive)

• My tagnote structure for my tag doesnt work on repeated trying 1248hrs

https://eleanorkonik.com/its-not-just-a-pretty-gimmick-in-defense-of-obsidians-graph-view/

https://eleanorkonik.com/obsidian-replaced-games-now-prolific/

• as I create my knowledge (exploration) base in Obsidian

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/maps-of-content

• SEE: obsidian

Create an obsidian plugin with svelte (need update to use vite/esbuild)

see video! INTERESANTE!

INTERESANTE: empezo en agosto! 2021-08

CUIDADO!

INCREIBLE PERO CIERTO! THANK YOU!

I'm seeing a larger growing pattern of people who are using Hypothes.is as a means of pulling their notes into their digital notebooks. Here Andy Matuschak is doing it to create spaced repetition cards for mnemonic purposes, a use case I haven't seen much of in the Hypothes.is space.

The fact that many are using Readwise (a paid monthly subscription) to do so is unfortunate. We definitely need more open source/free methods for doing this.

The Hypothesidian plugin for Obsidian is one of the few direct products I've seen in the space so far.

Most of this knowledge pattern I've seen has been in the tools for thought space and not within educational spaces, thought there is some overlap which will create the necessary bleed-through.

Services like IFTTT might also be a potential solution, but outputs from RSS and ATOM strip out data like tags which are highly useful. Perhaps a custom IFTTT integration? Though this opens up the issue of yet another middleman service for collecting rents.

Source: https://twitter.com/withorbit/status/1474575944429957125

I've been having a really good time this week writing prompts as inline annotations on web books. pic.twitter.com/gCvpTAsjt1

— Orbit (@withorbit) December 25, 2021

Quote Dataview

https://help.obsidian.md/Live+preview+update

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj-p_KHSBD8

https://github.com/chetachiezikeuzor/Highlightr-Plugin A minimal and aesthetically pleasing highlighting menu that makes color-coded highlighting much easier.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'> Note Apps </span> in "Got time to play with @chetachiiii's @obsdmd plugin called Highlightr and I love it! https://t.co/qIK47NOT4D https://t.co/SQal55OMdX" (<time class='dt-published'>12/07/2021 21:42:44</time>)</cite></small>

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/obsidian-book-club-the-dawn-of-everything

What a great idea!

The level of complexity to using some of these tools is also a huge hurdle for the everyday user as well. Some require deep knowledge of the tool along with coding ability as well.

Perhaps this complexity barrier will come down over time, but some projects don't seem to be working toward making things easier and simpler for the end user.

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/how-do-you-manage-lists-of-materials-books-to-read-films-to-watch/8494

Nothing too brilliant here above and beyond my current set up.

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/calibre/7981

https://diggingthedigital.com/open-s03e06-notities-raken-hyperconnected/

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1459547762517688327.html

Anthony Baker experimenting with ideas from Necromant and Eleanor Konik to cross link digital notes with physical paper notes.

I've thought about doing something similar to this with my physical notebooks in the past, though hadn't done block level linking as a means of potentially pulling in and linking pieces in the future.

Often for more important linked things, I'll simply import the physical version into my digital copy at the time of first use/reference, but this could be interesting for large bodies of notes which aren't digital.

Brief about why both tools work well.

Python repo to export Hypothesis annotations to Obsidian notes: https://github.com/collignon/annotation-tools

https://github.com/weichenw/obsidian-hypothesis-plugink

Blogging with Obsidian, Gatsby and Nextcloud https://andri.dk/blog/2021/blogging-with-obsidian-gatsby-and-nextcloud

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-release-v0-12-19/25666

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-release-v0-12-18/25541

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-release-v0-12-17/25270

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-release-v0-12-16/24166

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-release-v0-12-15/23348

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-release-v0-12-14/23046

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-release-v0-12-13/21959

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-release-v0-12-12/21564

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-release-v0-12-11/21184

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-release-v0-12-10/20523

This is still too often the case in the general public as evinced by watching the Obsidian and Roam Research spaces.

https://hackernoon.com/how-i-use-zettelkasten-and-obsidian-to-keep-my-notes-organized

Nothing new to the conversation. This is more of a note that links zettelkasten and Obsidian and nothing more.

The tools for thought crowd should all be reading Kalir and Garcia's book Annotation.

Here is a way to make better highlights

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCACgiFzfdw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRMrnyWlPqk

A potentially interesting task management plugin for obsidian. I'm a little worried about long-term support. I'm going to wait and see what happens.

This is not a published Chrome extension and it uses an odd workaround to circumvent Chrome security. So I'm not sure how safe it is. Keep an eye on it; if it develops enough, it could be quite useful.

This is another good possibility to hide most of the machinery of connecting hypothesis to obsidian. I like that it takes advantage of relatively robust existing bits of obsidian.

CLI-based method for batch exporting hypothesis annotations in markdown suitable for adding to Obsidian. I'm not sure I like it; the idea of batch-filing the process irks me. I would prefer for it to all happen in the background.

This has possibilities because it backgrounds a lot of the heavy lifting by saving the annotation to a local markdown file.

https://dev.to/einargudnig/building-my-second-brain-with-obsidian-pt-i-4oc2

too basic; Tiago Forte disciple; pass

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1381953081697562625.html

Is this similar to the mixing of a daily journal page with note taking seen in systems like Roam Research and the way some use Obsidian?

Paper Discovery:

• Research Rabbit
• Connected Papers
• Citation Gecko
• Papers With Code

Zotero SciHub - for downloading papers into one's Zotero instance

Academic Networking

• lens.org (also good for discovery)
• OrcID
• Impact Story

Ginko App (trees and cards interface) for writing with interesting import and export

around 2:56: A bit too much Andy Matuschak worship? Pretty sure he didn't invent the so-called Andy Mode. Index cards pre-dated them surely as did Ward Cunningham's Smallest Federated Wiki. There are many other idex-card UIs prior to Matuschak.

Map of Content (MOC) apparently comes from How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think by Lion Kimbro.

• it's a glorified Table of Contents really

Plugins he's using:

• 3:22:15 add codemirror matchbrackets js
• 3:23:31 advanced tables
• 3:26:09 Better word count
• 3:26:41 calendar
• 3:27:32 copy code block
• 3:28:25 cycle through panes
• 3:29:55 Dataview
• 3:30:33 editor syntax highlight
• 3:30:43 extended mathjax
• 3:31:08 file explorer note count
• 3:32:04 full-screen mode
• 3:32:23 highlgiht public notes
• 3:33:11 kanban
• 3:33:35 kindle highlights
• 3:33:56 metatable
• 3:34:24 mindmap
• 3:35:36 NLP dates
• 3:36:10 pane relief
• 3:36:42 paste URL
• 3:37:21 periodic notes
• 3:37:44 recent files
• 3:37:59 relevant line number
• 3:38:33 show current open note
• 3:38:45 review
• 3:39:43 sliding panes
• 3:40:42 super charged links
• 3:41:11 random note
• 3:41:39 tag wrangler
• 3:42:22 templater
• 3:46:05 zoom

textsniper for OCR and potentially text-to-speech, apple only, so leark for others.

MathPix

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4Qsu03Oz30

This same sort of functionality is something I'd built into my TiddlyWiki ages ago. Interesting to see some of these same sorts of functionalities being built into other note taking tools.

Sort of makes me want to consider nested tags in Obsidian...

He mentions Amazon wishlists that pile up and never get used. Similar to the way people pile up bookmarks and never use or revisit them.

One of the benefits of commonplace books (and tools like Obsidian, et al.) is that one is forced to re-see or re-discover these over time. This restumbling upon these things can be incredibly valuable.

https://medium.com/@benenewton/my-obsidian-daily-note-template-a4bdab53dc62

General overview of a someone's daily note template which uses the Templater plugin and the Tasks plugin.

Includes a link to a gist for those who'd like to copy the format or extend it for themselves.

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/how-to-connect-obsidian-with-ebooks/11418

Workflow for connecting Obsidian to either Zotero or Calibre for note taking.

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/epub-support/1403

Some interesting resources here, though none currently suit workflows I'm keen to support yet. There is a reference to FuturePress' epub.js which could be intriguing, though even here, I'm more likely to stick with Hypothes.is for annotating and note taking to keep context.