During the September Dutch PKM Obsidian meet-up the topic of discussion was journaling. An interesting thing that stood out was how a participant demonstrated their use of named block references in Obsidian.
In Obsidian any phrase surrounded by double brackets is a link to another note. Adding an circumflex (accent circonflexe, ^) behind such a link allows you to reference a specific paragraph inside a note. On occasion I’ve used those, though not often.
If you add the circumflex and select a paragraph, Obsidian will add a random alphanumeric code behind the selected paragraph in the original note, and to the end of your link. Removing or altering either will break the link.
What I hadn’t seen before was that you can add your own block references. At the meet-up someone did that using templates so he new the block references in specific types of notes, and could always refer to them elsewhere, in this case establishing links between day notes and week notes in a predictable manner. These block references can then be human readable, and re-used (as long they’re unique within a single note).
In the past days I found myself using them to references reading / literature notes from my own notes. Especially I noticed that I use the block reference to point to the part inside a paragraph I’m mostly referring to.
Below is an example from this week.
First a reference link in one of my notes, with the block reference ‘sortboxes’. Then the original annotation. The reference ‘sortboxes’ points exactly to my words in the annotation I am referencing.
It’s interesting that after learning this possibility a month ago, I now see myself doing that in a different manner than I saw it, yet as emergent behaviour, as a new earned structure. A useful thing perhaps to also adopt in Latticework, as during sensemaking it is common that new thoughts or associations latch on to steadily shorter phrases or even single words of annotated material rather than full paragraphs, as you progress in thinking things through.