- Nov 2023
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thatsthenorm.com thatsthenorm.com
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Live-Roaming: Using Roam to teach students in college
I'd listened to this whole episode sometime since 2022-04-05, but didn't put it in my notes.
Mark Robertson delineates how he actively models the use of his note taking practice (using Roam Research) while teaching/lecturing in the classroom. This sort of modeling can be useful for showing students how academics read, gather, and actively use their knowledge. It does miss the portion about using the knowledge to create papers, articles, books, etc., but the use of this mode of reading and notes within a discussion setting isn't terribly different.
Use of the system for conversation/discussion with the authors of various texts as you read, with your (past) self as you consult your own notes, or your students in classroom lectures/discussion sections is close to creating your own discussion for new audiences (by way of the work your write yourself.)
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1194506/4875515-mark-robertson-history-socratic-dialogue-live-roaming.mp3
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- May 2023
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www.strategicstructures.com www.strategicstructures.com
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developer.roamjs.com developer.roamjs.com
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roamjs.com roamjs.com
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roambrain.com roambrain.com
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louisshulman.medium.com louisshulman.medium.com
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srconstantin.github.io srconstantin.github.io
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- Feb 2023
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harleystagner.com harleystagner.com
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Digital Smart Notes Part 4: Creating Permanent Notes In Roam Research<br /> by Harley Stanger
Part 1: https://harleystagner.com/digital-smart-notes-part-1-the-capture-toolkit/ - Part 2: https://harleystagner.com/digital-smart-notes-part-2-exporting-highlights-to-roam-research-with-readwise/ - Part 3: https://harleystagner.com/digital-smart-notes-part-3-creating-literature-notes-in-roam-research/ - Part 4: Digital Smart Notes Part 4: Creating Permanent Notes In Roam Research
synopsis of Ahrens
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- Nov 2022
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two-way links
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oer.pressbooks.pub oer.pressbooks.pub
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partnerships, networking, and revenue generation such as donations, memberships, pay what you want, and crowdfunding
I have thought long about the same issue and beyond. The triple (wiki, Hypothesis, donations) could be a working way to search for OER, form a social group processing them, and optionally support the creators.
I imagine that as follows: a person wants to learn about X. They can head to the wiki site about X and look into its Hypothesis annotations, where relevant OER with their preferred donation method can be linked. Also, study groups interested in the respective resource or topic can list virtual or live meetups there. The date of the meetups could be listed in a format that Hypothesis could search and display on a calendar.
Wiki is integral as it categorizes knowledge, is comprehensive, and strives to address biases. Hypothesis stitches websites together for the benefit of the site owners and the collective wisdom that emerges from the discussions. Donations support the creators so they can dedicate their time to creating high-quality resources.
Main inspirations:
Deschooling Society - Learning Webs
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- Learning Webs
- schoolhouse
- Ivan Illych
- local
- creators
- collaborative
- meetup
- prompt
- discussion
- roam
- calendar
- hypothe
- web monetization
- schoolhouse.world
- donations
- virtual
- processing
- monetization
- authors
- annotations
- portfolio
- wiki
- OER
- pay what you want
- learning
- Deschooling
- crowdfunding
- global
- support
- social
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community.interledger.org community.interledger.org
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🌟 Highlight words as they are spoken (karaoke anybody?). 🌟 Navigate video by clicking on words. 🌟 Share snippets of text (with video attached!). 🌟 Repurpose by remixing using the text as a base and reference.
If I understand it correctly, with hyperaudio, one can also create transcription to somebody else's video or audio when embedded.
In that case, if you add to hyperaudio the annotation capablity of hypothes.is or docdrop, the vision outlined in the article on Global Knowledge Graph is already a reality.
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- graph
- creative
- lite
- conference
- plugin
- docdrop
- navigation
- roam
- video
- mobile
- monetization
- open
- speech
- translation
- interactive
- open source
- repurposing
- learning
- audio
- ML
- global
- transcript
- sharing
- knowledge
- remixing
- simultaneous
- speech to text
- timing
- annotation
- captions
- web monetization
- translate
- hyperaudio
- speech2text
- wordpress
- language
- commons
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www.henjohoeksma.nl www.henjohoeksma.nl
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Using a shortcut1 you can either share the url to their service or inject their javascript library and start annotating and commenting Medium style on any article you read, even on your phone!
Wouln't the Hypothesis bookmarklet be preferable and easier to use?
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discourse.devontechnologies.com discourse.devontechnologies.com
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Holy mackerel, when I saw the subject line of this topic I thought about Zoot – which I have not thought about in many months, and not for many years before that. Zoot was my introduction to this sort of “everything bucket” app. I also tried Info Select – which is also on Windows and may be an answer to @Claude’s question, assuming it’s still updated – and then to DevonThink and Evernote. My introduction to Zoot was an article by journalist James Fallows, of all people. He is the former editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, and reports mainly on public policy and politics. I wonder if he is still using Zoot? Three more probable options: Microsoft OneNote will be the most accessible to most Windows users. It doesn’t get you the search and “see also” of DevonThink. Obsidian and Roam Research take a different approach to the content-organization problems than DevonThink/OneNote/Evernote do. They rely on links and backlinks, like a personal Wikipedia. But they achieve the same goal of organizing information. They have search. AFAIK there’s nothing comparable to “see also,” but users report the same kind of serendipitous connections just by following the links they themselves made in the past. Another liability of Roam and Obsidian compared with DT: DT supports pretty much any kind of document that your computer can read, whereas Obsidian only supports Markdown, PDF, and images. I’m not as familiar with Roam, but I believe it has the same limitations. P.S. Partial answer to my own question: Fallows comes up in this forum as a person who advocated DT in a 2005 NYTimes article about “everything bucket” apps.
From a discussion on DEVONthink alternatives for Windows users.
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- Oct 2022
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www.loom.com www.loom.com
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https://www.loom.com/share/a05f636661cb41628b9cb7061bd749ae
Synopsis: Maggie Delano looks at some of the affordances supplied by Tana (compared to Roam Research) in terms of providing better block-based user interface for note type creation, search, and filtering.
These sorts of tools and programmable note implementations remind me of Beatrice Webb's idea of scientific note taking or using her note cards like a database to sort and search for data to analyze it and create new results and insight.
It would seem that many of these note taking tools like Roam and Tana are using blocks and sub blocks as a means of defining atomic notes or database-like data in a way in which sub-blocks are linked to or "filed underneath" their parent blocks. In reality it would seem that they're still using a broadly defined index card type system as used in the late 1800s/early 1900s to implement a set up that otherwise would be a traditional database in the Microsoft Excel or MySQL sort of fashion, the major difference being that the user interface is cognitively easier to understand for most people.
These allow people to take a form of structured textual notes to which might be attached other smaller data or meta data chunks that can be easily searched, sorted, and filtered to allow for quicker or easier use.
Ostensibly from a mathematical (or set theoretic and even topological) point of view there should be a variety of one-to-one and onto relationships (some might even extend these to "links") between these sorts of notes and database representations such that one should be able to implement their note taking system in Excel or MySQL and do all of these sorts of things.
Cascading Idea Sheets or Cascading Idea Relationships
One might analogize these sorts of note taking interfaces to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). While there is the perennial question about whether or not CSS is a programming language, if we presume that it is (and it is), then we can apply the same sorts of class, id, and inheritance structures to our notes and their meta data. Thus one could have an incredibly atomic word, phrase, or even number(s) which inherits a set of semantic relationships to those ideas which it sits below. These links and relationships then more clearly define and contextualize them with respect to other similar ideas that may be situated outside of or adjacent to them. Once one has done this then there is a variety of Boolean operations which might be applied to various similar sets and classes of ideas.
If one wanted to go an additional level of abstraction further, then one could apply the ideas of category theory to one's notes to generate new ideas and structures. This may allow using abstractions in one field of academic research to others much further afield.
The user interface then becomes the key differentiator when bringing these ideas to the masses. Developers and designers should be endeavoring to allow the power of complex searches, sorts, and filtering while minimizing the sorts of advanced search queries that an average person would be expected to execute for themselves while also allowing some reasonable flexibility in the sorts of ways that users might (most easily for them) add data and meta data to their ideas.
Jupyter programmable notebooks are of this sort, but do they have the same sort of hierarchical "card" type (or atomic note type) implementation?
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- programmable notes
- integrated development environment
- category theory
- user interface
- cascading idea sheets
- building blocks
- types of notes
- idea links
- scientific note taking
- Tana
- watch
- super tags
- Boolean algebra
- Roam Research
- Jupyter
- CSS
- integrated thinking environments
- card index as database
- Maggie Delano
- Beatrice Webb
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- Sep 2022
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twitter.com twitter.comTwitter1
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@BenjaminVanDyneReplying to @ChrisAldrichI wish I had a good answer! The book I use when I teach is Joseph Harris’s “rewriting” which is technically a writing book but teaches well as a book about how to read in a writerly way.
Thanks for this! I like the framing and general concept of the book.
It seems like its a good follow on to Dan Allosso's OER text How to Make Notes and Write https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/ or Sönke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes https://amzn.to/3DwJVMz which includes some useful psychology and mental health perspective.
Other similar examples are Umberto Eco's How to Write a Thesis (MIT, 2015) or Gerald Weinberg's The Fieldstone Method https://amzn.to/3DCf6GA These may be some of what we're all missing.
I'm reminded of Mark Robertson's (@calhistorian) discussion of modeling his note taking practice and output in his classroom using Roam Research. https://hyp.is/QuB5NDa0Ee28hUP7ExvFuw/thatsthenorm.com/mark-robertson-history-socratic-dialogue/ Perhaps we need more of this?
Early examples of this sort of note taking can also be seen in the religious studies space with Melanchthon's handbook on commonplaces or Jonathan Edwards' Miscellanies, though missing are the process from notes to writings. https://www.logos.com/grow/jonathan-edwards-organizational-genius/
Other examples of these practices in the wild include @andy_matuschak's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGcs4tyey18 and TheNonPoet's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sdp0jo2Fe4 Though it may be better for students to see this in areas in which they're interested.
Hypothes.is as a potential means of modeling and allowing students to directly "see" this sort of work as it progresses using public/semi-public annotations may be helpful. Then one can separately model re-arranging them and writing a paper. https://web.hypothes.is/
Reply to: https://twitter.com/BenjaminVanDyne/status/1571171086171095042
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
- Jul 2022
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learntrepreneurs.com learntrepreneurs.com
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See also the author's (Eva Keiffenheim) article on RoamBrain: THE COMPLETE GUIDE FOR BUILDING A ZETTELKASTEN WITH ROAM RESEARCH
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- May 2022
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www.otherlife.co www.otherlife.co
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The PKM space has gotten crazy, but mostly through bad practice, lack of history, and hype. There are a few valid points I see mirrored here, but on the whole this piece is broadly off base due to a lack of proper experience, practice and study. I definitely would recommend he take a paid course to fix the issue, but delve more deeply into recommended historical practices.
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The single most widely shared marketing image for Roam Research
This useless knowledge graph is one of the worst parts about Roam Research. It is bad UI and wholly unusable.
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- Apr 2022
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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using rome as a almost a tool to convey information to your future self
One's note taking is not only a conversation with the text or even the original author, it is also a conversation you're having with your future self. This feature is accelerated when one cross links ideas within their note box with each other and revisits them at regular intervals.
Example of someone who uses Roam Research and talks about the prevalence of using it as a "conversation with your future self."
This is very similar to the same patterns that can be seen in the commonplace book tradition, and even in the blogosphere (Cory Doctorow comes to mind), or IndieWeb which often recommends writing on your own website to document how you did things for your future self.
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roam.elaptics.co.uk roam.elaptics.co.uk
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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Much of Barthes’ intellectual and pedagogical work was producedusing his cards, not just his published texts. For example, Barthes’Collège de France seminar on the topic of the Neutral, thepenultimate course he would take prior to his death, consisted offour bundles of about 800 cards on which was recorded everythingfrom ‘bibliographic indications, some summaries, notes, andprojects on abandoned figures’ (Clerc, 2005: xxi-xxii).
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.
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github.com github.com
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https://github.com/mathieudutour/gatsby-digital-garden
A set of packages to create a digital garden with Gatsby.
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- Mar 2022
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roam.elaptics.co.uk roam.elaptics.co.uk
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maybe i need to explain that i changed the way i write in rome a little bit 01:23:42 because i um use the blocks as um individual notes so that 01:23:55 the page can become what in the traditional center cast might be a note sequence and if two notes are directly related i might just add another block 01:24:07 because you still have the granularity with the block references um a question would become part of that note sequence and 01:24:19 [Music] they are just a part of the writing itself so i don't have a special question page 01:24:33 i have a lot of questions within the ongoing dialogues and sometimes 01:24:44 um there are the ones that turn into a project and um so they are on top of my mind and um they 01:24:59 might move into the uh shortcut section because i just want to jump right back into that the next day 01:25:13 but there is no sophisticated system to deal with questions they are just part of it
Sönke Ahrens uses block references in Roam Research as zettels (or atomic notes), but puts them into larger pages almost as if he was pre-building larger project pages, as described in his book.
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nesslabs.com nesslabs.com
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This quote from G.R.R. Martin, the author of A Song of Ice and Fire and other novels, offers a good illustration of the key difference between Roam and Notion: “I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows. And I’m much more a gardener than an architect.”
A good way to think about Roam vs. Notion.
Notion is more for the "architects" and Roam is better suited for the "gardeners."
The thing is, we ALL have parts of our life that require precision and parts where we need creativity. Both tools might be used successfully.
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- Feb 2022
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every.to every.to
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https://every.to/superorganizers/the-fall-of-roam
A user talks about why they've stopped using Roam Research.
I suspect that a lot of people have many of the same issues and to a great extent, it's a result of them not understanding the underlying use cases of the problems they're trying to solve.
This user is focusing on it solving the problem of where one is placing their data in hopes that it will fix all their problems, but without defining the reason why they're using the tool and what problems they hope for it to solve.
Note taking is a much broader idea space than many suppose.
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I used to use Roam for lots of things: a daily diary, book notes, keeping track of lists like my todo list, and taking meeting notes.Today, this is my stack:Daily Diary / paper notebookBook Notes / split between Roam and MuseTo-do List / ThingsMeeting Notes / Apple Notes
An example of a user who is (no longer) centralizing everything into one place. Also an example of a person overloading their use of note taking tool as a melting pot of data. Do they have a mental map of how to separate the pieces to get the value out of their system?
It seems like they want it to "just work" without any conception of what this looks like
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It turns out that I am rarely in a position, while writing or thinking, where I want to glance through lots of old notes as a way to figure out what to say or do. Mostly that feels like sifting through stale garbage.
Example of someone who doesn't appreciate the work of note taking.
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reallifemag.com reallifemag.com
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https://reallifemag.com/rank-and-file/
An interesting example of someone who fell into the trap of thinking that a particular tool or tools would magically make them smarter or help them do a particular line of work without showing any deep evidence of knowing what they were doing. The discussion here flows over a number of mixed note taking domains with no clear thrust for what they were using it pointedly for. The multiple directions and lack of experience likely doomed them to failure here.
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- Jan 2022
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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.
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roam.elaptics.co.uk roam.elaptics.co.uk
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In my very next letter, Letter XVI, I reported that Conor had perhaps heard our concerns about the cult connotations, and also decided to move away from the use of it too.
I always thought of the #RoamCult hashtag as a bit tongue-in-cheek, but certainly something with a more positive framing could be chosen.
It's interesting to hear that the project seems to have gone quiet and that the perception is that people are leaving for other projects (many of them open source, which is one of the spaces many of the early adopters were already working in).
There's definitely a drive in a lot of this space for people to own their own data given it's direct value to them over other (more social facing) tools.
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- Dec 2021
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thesephist.com thesephist.com
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One of my greatest concerns about this field today is that almost all of the problem discovery happens by a kind of self-interested navel-gazing process, where product builders take the quote “build things you would want to use” a little too literally, and build products for the small niche group of people interested in note-taking tools and processes. This leads to products that seem useful to a small group of other people who are also working in this space and familiar with its vernacular and concepts, but are unusable or unapproachable by most people outside of that small community. I think this is a dangerous failure mode.
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.
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- Nov 2021
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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fiet even today note taking generally remains an areaof tacit knowledgeW acquired by imitation rather than formal instructionWand about which there is little explicit discussionY
This is still too often the case in the general public as evinced by watching the Obsidian and Roam Research spaces.
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- Oct 2021
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commonplace.knowledgefutures.org commonplace.knowledgefutures.org
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For academics, annotation is also essential to scholarly communication and knowledge production. With Annotation, we eagerly accepted a social and scholarly responsibility to spark, curate, and facilitate discussion about annotation.
The tools for thought crowd should all be reading Kalir and Garcia's book Annotation.
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www.orgroam.com www.orgroam.com
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To use this, create the following bookmarklet in your browser:
** For roam-ref
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This protocol finds or creates a new note with a given ROAM_REFS:
Protocol 2!
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To enable Org-roam’s protocol extensions, simply add the following to your init file:
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To test that you have the handler setup and registered properly from the command line you can run:
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For users that prefer using a side-window for the org-roam buffer, the following example configuration should provide a good starting point:
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org-roam-buffer-display-dedicated: Launch an Org-roam buffer for a specific node without visiting its file. Unlike org-roam-buffer-toggle you can have multiple such buffers and their content won’t be automatically replaced with a new node at point.
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org-roam-buffer-toggle: Launch an Org-roam buffer that tracks the node currently at point. This means that the content of the buffer changes as the point is moved, if necessary.
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- Sep 2021
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Awesome collection. I've spent a lot of time looking into this myself. I'm a heavy Instapaper user, using this Chrome extension to export annotations to Roam (not Roam-specific): https://github.com/houshuang/instapaper-exporter-extension. However, it's really frustrating that Instapaper isn't better... Highlighting on iPhone is jarring, it often jumps randomly when I long-press, I can't capture images etc. And the API is useless - no way of getting more than the first 200 items, which is why the extension above scrapes their website... Looked into Pocket, but they don't even allow entering your own notes. I also recently looked into RSS - Feedly pro (not cheap) allows annotations and has an API - I'll experiment with the API later, but I might also just tag articles and have them sent to Instapaper... Wallabag looks cool, wish I was an iOS developer so I could add the stuff I want :)
The way to export Instapaper annotations to Roam without using Readwise as a middleware
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www.alasdairekpenyong.com www.alasdairekpenyong.com
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Alasdair Ekpenyong's Digital Garden
Alasdair is an academic in the area of library science.
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systemcrafters.cc systemcrafters.cc
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threadreaderapp.com threadreaderapp.com
- Aug 2021
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scripting.com scripting.com
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Sounds like Dave Winer is tinkering around getting Little Outliner to work with Roam or Roam like structures? He certainly might have some useful ideas for Flancian in terms of cobbling together all these note taking / wiki-like platforms.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7TO-OkIMtI
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Aaron Davis</span> in 📑 How to remember more of what you read | Read Write Collect (<time class='dt-published'>08/20/2021 12:31:59</time>)</cite></small>
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www.thrivinghenry.com www.thrivinghenry.com
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Aaron Davis</span> in 📑 How to remember more of what you read | Read Write Collect (<time class='dt-published'>08/20/2021 12:31:59</time>)</cite></small>
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One might weU see a further example of this process in the incorporation into Alsted's Consiliarius académicas et schohsticus (1610) of a category of random, day-to-day observations and reading notes ("ephemerides" or "diaria").
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?
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- Jul 2021
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roam.elaptics.co.uk roam.elaptics.co.uk
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A free email course for Roam Research.
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roam.garden roam.garden
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There's apparently a product that will turn one's Roam Research notes into a digital garden.
Great to see a bridge for making these things easier for the masses, but I have to think that there's a better and cheaper way. Perhaps some addition competition in the space will help bring the price down.
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bzawilski.medium.com bzawilski.medium.com
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https://bzawilski.medium.com/using-zettelkasten-and-obsidian-to-learn-more-effectively-333ac90d001a
Facile overview article that touches on the basics but looses sight of the longer flow of history.
Don't recommend.
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https://dev.to/tmhall99/beyond-taking-notes-or-how-i-joined-the-roamcult-22k3
Lots of resources on the topic to start down a rabbit hole, but no clear outline or thesis of what is going on or why it's useful. At best a list of potentially useful links for getting started.
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flancia.org flancia.org
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snarkmarket.com snarkmarket.com
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Revisiting this essay to review it in the framing of digital gardens.
In a "gardens and streams" version of this metaphor, the stream is flow and the garden is stock.
This also fits into a knowledge capture, growth, and innovation framing. The stream are small atomic ideas flowing by which may create new atomic ideas. These then need to be collected (in a garden) where they can be nurtured and grow into new things.
Clippings of these new growth can be placed back into the stream to move on to other gardeners. Clever gardeners will also occasionally browse through the gardens of others to see bigger picture versions of how their gardens might become.
Proper commonplacing is about both stock and flow. The unwritten rule is that one needs to link together ideas and expand them in places either within the commonplace or external to it: essays, papers, articles, books, or other larger structures which then become stock for others.
While some creators appear to be about all stock in the modern era, it's just not true. They're consuming streams (flow) from other (perhaps richer) sources (like articles, books, television rather than social media) and building up their own stock in more private (or at least not public) places. Then they release that article, book, film, television show which becomes content stream for others.
While we can choose to create public streams, but spending our time in other less information dense steams is less useful. Better is to keep a reasonably curated stream to see which other gardens to go visit.
Currently is the online media space we have structures like microblogs and blogs (and most social media in general) which are reasonably good at creating streams (flow) and blogs, static sites, and wikis which are good for creating gardens (stock).
What we're missing is a structure with the appropriate and attendant UI that can help us create both a garden and a stream simultaneously. It would be nice to have a wiki with a steam-like feed out for the smaller attendant ideas, but still allow the evolutionary building of bigger structures, which could also be placed into the stream at occasional times.
I can imagine something like a MediaWiki with UI for placing small note-like ideas into other streams like Twitter, but which supports Webmention so that ideas that come back from Twitter or other consumers of one's stream can be placed into one's garden. Perhaps in a Zettelkasten like way, one could collect atomic notes into their wiki and then transclude those ideas into larger paragraphs and essays within the same wiki on other pages which might then become articles, books, videos, audio, etc.
Obsidian, Roam Research do a somewhat reasonable job on the private side and have some facility for collecting data, but have no UI for sharing out into streams.
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- Jun 2021
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dash.eloquent.works dash.eloquent.worksEloquent1
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An interesting tool for taking notes from Jeremy Ho. Designed with Roam Research in mind.
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>The Eloquent tool is available to install! Capture ideas in-context with:<br>• On-page highlighting<br>• Nested bullets<br>• /snippets<br>• [[braces]] and #tag syntax<br>Quick capture is a hotkey away. Bonus hotkey sends your highlights/links to @RoamResearch pic.twitter.com/vLLbPX4zwW
— Jeremy Ho (@jeremyqho) July 21, 2020I wish it could save data as a local text or markdown file so it would also be easier to use with Obsidian or other note taking tools. It's similar in nature to the Roam Highlighter extension.
Details at https://www.notion.so/Eloquent-Resource-Center-72f95c2a71d34c5181e4907edf7a96e1
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stoa.anagora.org stoa.anagora.orgStoapad1
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Some conventions may be emerging in a new batch of personal knowledge management tools, or amenable to them; for the duration of this document, we'll refer to these tools as [[personal knowledge management]] tools, [[roam like]] or (preferred as of the time of writing) [[wiki like]].
It would be incredibly useful to have a list of these [[Roam Research like]] tools so that they can be documented as to what level of input they can/could take and remain compatible from text, to text+[[wiki links]], to the various flavors of markdown up to full HTML perhaps.
I know a handful are documented at indieweb.org/commonplace_book
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- Feb 2021
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danallosso.substack.com danallosso.substack.com
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every.to every.to
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Comments
This word is exactly the point. What if this web page were a public thing within Roam? Then other people's notebooks could comment within their own, but using notifications (via Webmention) could be placed into a comments section at the bottom of one's page or even done inline on the portions they're commenting on using block references.
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For instance, Notion has a sort of straightforward design that’s meant to be easy for anyone to use and learn. They prioritize making it obvious for newcomers, whereas Roam is more focused on power users who are willing to put quite a bit of effort into learning a new paradigm.
Notice the difference in user interface and onboarding between [[Notion]] and [[Roam Research]].
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In other words, Roam could be the thing the scientist uses for fun to organize their book notes, or they could also be the thing that same scientist uses at work to collaborate with colleagues on discovering new truths, paid for by their employer.
But why can't it do both?
Because it's on the same platform, they could allow people to make their notes public and shareable. They could add Webmention support so that one notebook could talk to another!
C'mon people!!? Don't you remember the dream of the Memex?
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It’s been less than a year since Roam started to gain traction, Notion just added Roam’s signature bi-directional link functionality, and there are already open-source “Roam compatible” apps on the horizon, like Athens.
This is the first reference I've heard about [[Athens]], but there are many others that aren't mentioned here including Obsidian, Foam, TiddlyWiki, etc. which have been adding the backlinking capabilities.
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Personal todo lists don’t depend on others using the same system (no network effects)
They don't unless you're building a wiki or commonplace book that can interact with those of others. (Roam research isn't doing this---yet, but they should.) Ideally small building block pieces will allow it to dovetail with other systems that could potentially do the same thing.
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- Dec 2020
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hellotimking.com hellotimking.com
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It needs wiki-like superpowersIf there is one feature that excels above all others in information software of the past two decades that deserves its place in the note taking pantheon, its the humble double bracketed internal link.We all recognise power to store and retrieve information at will, but when you combine this power with the ability to successfully create new knowledge trees from existing documents, to follow thoughts in a ‘stream of consciousness’ non-linear fashion then individual notes transform from multiple static word-silos into a living information system system.Sadly, this is the one major feature that is always neglected, or is piecemeal at best… and one time note taking king Evernote is to blame.
Tim Kling posits that one of the most important features for a note taking app to have (which most lack at the time of writing) is the ability to link to other notes with the wiki-standard double bracket command.
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sspai.com sspai.com
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第三步:渐进式归纳(Progressively summarize)虽然手头有已经导出的笔记可用,但这些笔记毕竟是抽离了具体语境的只言片语或框架结构,若要令其有用武之地,就有必要增添内容,但这又需要在简洁和易懂之间取得平衡。为实现这一目的,本文作者提出了「渐进式归纳」(视频、文章)的概念,下面简述之。(按:这个视频结合了具体案例,可以帮助自己具体执行技术性步骤,强烈推荐全程观看。)
正是目前阶段需要的自下而上的笔记整理
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www.fredshack.com www.fredshack.com
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Jeff Sonnabend in the Ecco Yahoo forum: "I remember first trying to learn Ecco 1.0. It was tough until the proverbial light went on. Then it all made sense. For me, it was simply understanding that Ecco is just a data base. So called folders are nothing more than fields in a flat-file table (like a spreadsheet). The rest is interface and implementation of various users' work or management systems in Ecco. That learning curve, to me, is the primary Ecco "weakness", at least as far as new users go."
There was a steep learning curve involved with using ECCO Pro. Reminds me of Roam, which also has a steep learning curve, but then it feels like it's worth it.
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Chris Thompson: "If your goals in using a PIM are mostly calendaring, todos, and a phonebook, then Maximizer, Outlook, and Time and Chaos all do a reasonable job. On an enterprise-level, Lotus Notes would be another good choice. If you're more interested in keeping track of notes or research, Lotus Agenda, Zoot, or InfoHandler are better choices. For keeping track of miscellaneous files, InfoSelect is pretty good. On the other hand, if you want to do a little of everything, and do it well, Ecco really has no rivals."
ECCO Pro was loved for its ability to do a lot of different things versus being good at one narrow thing. Reminds me of Roam Research.
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- Nov 2020
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www.usenix.org www.usenix.org
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At the same time, use of the web is now ubiquitous,and ”Google” is a verb. With the advent of search en-gines, users have learned to find data by describing whatthey want (e.g., various characteristics of a photo) insteadof where it lives (i.e., the full pathname of the photo inthe filesystem). This can be seen in the popularity ofsearch as a modern desktop paradigm in such products asWindows Desktop Search (WDS) [26]; MacOS X Spot-light [21], which fully integrates search with the Mac-intosh journaled HFS+ file system [7]; and the variousdesktop search engines for Linux [4, 27]. Indeed, MacOS X in particular goes one step further and exports APIsto developers allowing applications to directly access themeta-data store and content index.
With the advent of search engines, search as a paradigm for retrieving files has become ubiquitous.
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news.ycombinator.com news.ycombinator.com
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I've spent the last 3.5 years building a platform for "information applications". The key observation which prompted this was that hierarchical file systems didn't work well for organising information within an organisation.However, hierarchy itself is still incredibly valuable. People think in terms of hierarchies - it's just that they think in terms of multiple hierarchies and an item will almost always belong in more than one place in those hierarchies.If you allow users to describe items in the way which makes sense to them, and then search and browse by any of the terms they've used, then you've eliminated almost all the frustrations of a file system. In my experience of working with people building complex information applications, you need: * deep hierarchy for classifying things * shallow hierarchy for noting relationships (eg "parent company") * multi-values for every single field * controlled values (in our case by linking to other items wherever possible) Unfortunately, none of this stuff is done well by existing database systems. Which was annoying, because I had to write an object store.
Impressed by this comment. It foreshadows what Roam would become:
- People think in terms of items belonging to multiple hierarchies
- If you allow users to describe items in a way that makes sense to them and allow them to search and browse by any of the terms they've used, you've solved many of the problems of existing file systems
What you need to build a complex information system is:
- Deep hierarchies for classifying things (overlapping hierarchies should be possible)
- Shallow hierarchies for noting relationships (Roam does this with a flat structure)
- Multi-values for every single field
- Controlled values (e.g. linking to other items when possible)
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails.
Although Bush envisioned associative trails to be navigable sequences of original content and notes interspersed, what seems to make more sense when viewed through today's technology, is a rich document of notes where the relevant pieces from external documents are transcluded.
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The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
The human mind doesn't work according to the file-cabinet metaphor — it operates by association.
"With one items in its gras, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain."
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The real heart of the matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a lag in the adoption of mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of development of devices for their use. Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path.
Bush emphasises the importance of retrieval in the storage of information. He talks about technical limitations, but in this paragraph he stresses that retrieval is made more difficult by the "artificiality of systems of indexing", in other words, our default file-cabinet metaphor for storing information.
Information in such a hierarchical architecture is found by descending down into the hierarchy, and back up again. Moreover, the information we're looking for can only be in one place at a time (unless we introduce duplicates).
Having found our item of interest, we need to ascend back up the hierarchy to make our next descent.
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So much for the manipulation of ideas and their insertion into the record. Thus far we seem to be worse off than before—for we can enormously extend the record; yet even in its present bulk we can hardly consult it. This is a much larger matter than merely the extraction of data for the purposes of scientific research; it involves the entire process by which man profits by his inheritance of acquired knowledge. The prime action of use is selection, and here we are halting indeed. There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene.
Retrieval is the key activity we're interested in. Storage only matters in as much as we can retrieve effectively. At the time of writing (1945) large amounts of information could be stored (extend the record), but consulting that record was still difficult.
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A record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.
Bush emphasises the need for notes to not only be stored, but also to be queried (consulted).
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You need to have a habit of tagging something as a to-do to synthesize the idea further, and then periodically go back and review those and write them in a more crisp language, or build up your evergreen notes so that you have this library of thoughts that you are able to get that compound interest on.
You need a system inside Roam which helps you review notes that are not yet refined.
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We encourage people to use the daily notes and to brainstorm and brain dump, and just write all the things they’re thinking. I think that the first thing that we’re interested in is, how do you build systems so that it’s easy for you to take those and gradually refine them?
Conor is asking himself, how do you get people to take (daily) notes, and how do you get them to refine them.
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I think that you need to be able to get compound interest on your thoughts. Good ideas come from when ideas have sex: the intersection of different things that you’ve been reading or different things you’ve been seeing. So you can have better ideas faster if you are actually reviewing the old things and you are building up. You’re not throwing away work.
Good ideas come when ideas meet, so it is beneficial to promote this.
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We’ve always wanted to build a layer on top of the web where every person can have their mental model of how the whole world works, and they can start to share ideas across everything.
Conor's idea of Roam was a layer on top of the web where everyone can have their mental model of how the world works.
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I was originally interested in figuring out how you could figure out what’s actually true online.
Conor was trying to figure out how to find out what's true online with Roam.
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web.archive.org web.archive.org
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One pane: With one pane outliners, the content is displayed immediately below the category. A printed legal document is an example of a one-pane document. A web site with a table-of-contents "frame" on the left hand side is similar to a two-pane outline. A Usene t news group is similar to a three pane outline. When writing documents, or organizing ideas for a project (such as a speech, or for software design) I much prefer one pane outlines. I find they are more conducive to collapsing ideas, because you can mix text with categories, rather than radically split ting the organizational technique from the content (as the two and three pane outlines do).
In one pane outliners the text is displayed under its parent.
This can be more conducive to writing because you're not splitting work on the organization from work on the content. In writing this separation is fuzzy anyway.
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With Lotus Notes, I can combine a hierarchically organized outline view of the documents, with full text searching, hypertext links and traditiona l relational database like reports (for example, a sorted view of items to do).
What Lotus Notes allowed you to do is to combine a hierarchical organized overview, achieved through an outliner, with search, hyperlinks and relational-database-like reports. Lotus Notes also allowed you to organized different document formats (Word, emails, etc.)
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www.cl.cam.ac.uk www.cl.cam.ac.uk
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Alexanderproposeshomesandofficesbedesignedandbuiltbytheireventualoccupants.Thesepeople,hereasons,knowbesttheirrequirementsforaparticularstructure.Weagree,andmakethesameargumentforcomputerprograms.Computerusersshouldwritetheirownprograms.KentBeck&WardCunningham,1987 [7]
Users should program their own programs because they know their requirements the best.
[7]: Beck, K. and Cunningham, W. Using pattern languages for object-oriented programs. Tektronix, Inc. Technical Report No. CR-87-43 (September 17, 1987), presented at OOPSLA-87 workshop on Specification and Design for Object-Oriented Programming. Available online at http://c2.com/doc/oopsla87.html (accessed 17 September 2009)
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www.roambrain.com www.roambrain.com
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Connected to this are Andy Matuschak’s comments about contextual backlinks bootstrapping new concepts before explicit definitions come into play.
What Joel says here about Contextual Backlinks is that they allow you to "bootstrap" a concept (i.e. start working with it) without explicit definitions coming into play (or as Andy would say, the content is empty).
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Easily updated pages: don’t worry about precisely naming something at first. Let the meaning emerge over time and easily change it (propagating through all references).
Joel highlights a feature here of Roam and ties it to incremental formalisms.
In Roam you can update a page name and it propagates across all references.
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Cognitive Overhead (aka Cognitive Load): often the task of specifying formalism is extraneous to the primary task, or is just plain annoying to do.
This is the task that you're required to do when you want to save a note in Evernote or Notion. You need to choose where it goes.
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The basic intuition is described well by the Shipman & Marshall paper: users enter information in a mostly informal fashion, and then formalize only later in the task when appropriate formalisms become clear and also (more) immediately useful.
Incremental formalism
Users enter information in an informal fashion. They only formalize later when the appropriate formalism becomes clear and/or immediately useful.
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It’s important to notice something about these examples of synthesis representations: they go quite a bit further than simply grouping or associating things (though that is an important start). They have some kind of formal semantic structure (otherwise known as formality) that specifies what entities exist, and what kinds of relations exist between the entities. This formal structure isn’t just for show: it’s what enables the kind of synthesis that really powers significant knowledge work! Formal structures unlock powerful forms of reasoning like conceptual combination, analogy, and causal reasoning.
Formalisms enable synthesis to happen.
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notes.andymatuschak.org notes.andymatuschak.org
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Systems which display backlinks to a node permit a new behavior: you can define a new node extensionally (rather than intensionally) by simply linking to it from many other nodes—even before it has any content.
Nodes in a knowledge management system can be defined extensionally, rather than intensionally, through their backlinks and their respective context.
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This effect requires Contextual backlinks: a simple list of backlinks won’t implicitly define a node very effectively. You need to be able to see the context around the backlink to understand what’s being implied.
Bi-Directional links, or backlinks, only help define the node being linked to if the context in which the links occur is also provided.
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www.mac-history.net www.mac-history.net
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In 1995 Steve Jobs could still remember it exactly. In an interview with Robert X. Cringely for the PBS show “Triumph of the nerds” he said:I had three or four people (at Apple) who kept bugging that I get my rear over to Xerox PARC and see what they are doing. And, so I finally did. I went over there. And they were very kind. They showed me what they are working on. And they showed me really three things. But I was so blinded by the first one that I didn’t even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object oriented programming – they showed me that but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was a networked computer system… they had over a hundred Alto computers all networked using email etc., etc., I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life. Now remember it was very flawed. What we saw was incomplete, they’d done a bunch of things wrong. But we didn’t know that at the time but still thought they had the germ of the idea was there and they’d done it very well. And within – you know – ten minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this some day. It was obvious. You could argue about how many years it would take. You could argue about who the winners and losers might be. You could’t argue about the inevitability, it was so obviousSteve Jobs about his visit to Xerox PARC – Clip from Robert Cringley’s TV documentation “Triumph of the Nerds“.
Steve Jobs when given a tour at the Xerox PARC in 1979 was so struck by the GUI that they were developing that he could not even process the other things he was shown (Object Oriented Programming and Networked Computing).
"And within - you know - ten minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this some day. It was obvious. You could argue about how many years it would take. You could argue about who the winners or losers might be. You couldn't argue about the inevitability, it was obvious."
This reminds me of the moment Roam first clicked for me.
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www.nateliason.com www.nateliason.com
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This whole system is much, much better than having to manually update some CRM like in Airtable. Since you're naturally tagging people as you interact with them, you can create an easy record of your relationship with them and compile any useful notes on them as you go.
If you use Roam as a CRM, in your daily note you can simply tag a person you just had a meeting with and log some notes. Those notes will then show up under that person in the linked references under a block for the current date.
So in one sentence, with using only your keyboard, you've created a meeting note linked to a person and linked to a specific date.
With any other solution you'd have to navigate to a person, create an entry, set a date and write the note.
This "decide where to put it" step is completely replaced with "what entities does this pertain to".
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The references also have a really robust filtering tool. For example, I could filter all the references to Mindfulness to only include pages that also reference Books:
You can also filter the references by Tags/Pages.
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This is the best feature I’ve found for discovering new relationships between information.
The unlinked references section is a great way to discover new relationships between information.
It's also an area where a digital Zettelkasten outperforms an analog one.
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This is another area where Roam really stands out from Evernote and Notion. Have you tried to link to another page in either of them? It’s a nightmare of right clicks or slash commands, it takes way too long. In Roam it’s so seamless that you can do it without interrupting your typing flow.
A big benefit of Roam is the speed with which you can make a link to a another page.
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This removes all the decision making about where to put things that you frequently run into with Evernote, Notion, etc. When everything can be everywhere, you don’t have to worry about the filing structure. You just keep adding links.
Nat's conclusion is correct, but his reason for arriving at that conclusion is wrong.
You're not faced with the question of where to put things with Roam because you can do the following:
(1) You can tag a new entry on the fly, in-line, CLI style. (2) If the tag exists, it will autocomplete, if it doesn't you can create it with no extra effort (3) Any tags you add are links to their respective pages, which allows you to (a) navigate their as soon as you've typed the tag/page name and (b) it creates a backlink on those pages so your new entry is automatically linked to from there.
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This also highlights a big difference between Roam and other note taking tools: tags are both everything and nothing. Every page is a tag, and every tag is a page.
Nat says that tags are everything and nothing, but I don't agree with that.
Pages consist of blocks.
A reference to a page is treated in the exact same way as a tag.
A block is not treated in the same way. A block is not a tag.
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- Oct 2020
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divinations.substack.com divinations.substack.com
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If you take a bong rip and close your eyes, you can imagine a world where Roam is a new sort of internet. Where people can publish ideas and reference each other’s ideas in deep, interlinked ways. It’d be like a giant public brain, instead of a private second brain.
This section 6 is a key bit on how Roam can function as a much larger 2nd global brain.
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www.nateliason.com www.nateliason.com
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The Instapaper highlights go to my Evernote inbox, then I copy them from Evernote into Roam (annoying, I know, hopefully the Roam API will be set up soon!)
Getting data into any of these note taking tools quickly always seems to be the most difficult part of the process.
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www.eastgate.com www.eastgate.com
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Storyspace has an always-visible Toolbar and Menu to aid students. The Toolbar (Figure 2) provides, top-left to right and down: a Writing Space tool (to create writing areas), the Arrow tool (already familiar to Macintosh users) for routine selecting and clicking, the Note tool (the star) for attaching notes to text, and the Navigation tool (double-headed arrow) for creating and following text links. The Magnify tool (three windows) decreases or enlarges the size of windows. The Linking tool (boxes connected by line) enables linking of one text to other text areas. The Tunnel tool (box within a box) permits linking over widely separated writing spaces. The Compass (four directional arrows) is used to move quickly through levels of the chart, outline, or windows.
The design of this, which predates that of the wiki, also seems eerily familiar as a digital version of a zettelkasten or the design which seems to underlie Roam Research's product.
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- Aug 2020
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github.com github.com
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The main job of TXO is to take a raw Bitcoin transaction and transform it into a structured format on top of which we can run all kinds of powerful query, processing, and filter.
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- May 2020
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www.ianjones.us www.ianjones.us
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First things first, I am new to emacs and the eco system so there are packages I’m not aware of.
emacs is pretty much an operating system. This makes it infinitely configurable and hard for new comers to grok.
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- Dec 2019
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www.lesswrong.com www.lesswrong.com
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Roam Research
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