Category: Personal tools

Personal digital tools

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In reply to SPARK! Toon random kennis in Obsidian by Frank Meeuwsen

Leuk Frank! Ik heb het nog niet geprobeerd of bekeken, maar ik ga dit denk ik proberen te gebruiken om een random quote uit mijn map van web clippings te halen en af te beelden bovenin mijn Daglog. Om op die manier blootgesteld te worden aan dingen die ik al een keer bewaarde. Je vraagt naar aanvulling: zou je in plaats van een map ook naar een enkel bestand kunnen wijzen? Bijvoorbeeld naar de annotaties van een boek dat ik net las, zodat ik dat als het ware verder verwerk door toevallige interactie er mee.

… op mijn Obsidian homepage laad ik continu een random paragraaf uit de Tao Te Ching. Door op een button te klikken verandert de paragraaf en kan ik naar het origineel doorklikken voor verdere studie. Ik maakte hiervoor een eigen script…. Kun je hier iets mee? Zo ja, waar gebruik je het nu voor?

Frank Meeuwsen

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The past year I’ve had more conversations about personal knowledge management than for a long time before. Regularly questions come up along the lines of what structures should one use, what should one keep in their notes, what are the best tools? Most of my contributions to such conversations boil down to ‘there’s nothing you should do other than what fits you, and I could show you what I do and why that works for me’.
Ultimately I keep thinking people don’t take the P in PKM far enough. I think PKM is personal not just in one way, but in at least three ways.

  1. It is personal knowledge management in the sense that your system is yours only. You do it, build and extend it as you see fit. It can exist independently of whatever other working environments you have, it is fully personally yours. This enables and secures your professional and learning autonomy, allows you to be pro-active. You bring professionalism to its upkeep and tools. When you go someplace else, you take it along with you.
  2. It is management of your personal knowledge. Personal knowledge in the sense of your own networks of meaning, your insights, the expressed connections you made between pieces of it, your associations and verbiage that tie into your internal world. It exists to feed your agency, your combinatory creativity, and is aimed at your own mix of evolving personal interests. It’s there for just you to interact with. This allows you to steer the direction of your own learning intentionally, and enables an activist and artisanal stance towards your interests, professional or otherwise. Your personal knowledge doesn’t need to be understandable or be useful to others. Sharing in context is an act in itself, an output rather than a function.
  3. It is personal management of knowledge. You have your own methods and structures, that are geared to how you work, think, learn and create best, and which have emerged over time and you then reinforced because of their utility to you. You create your own mechanisms and algorithms working with your material, and reflect on them. Your system does not need to be understandable or workable for others. Your structures fit your internal world, have their logic and starting point in the fact that your behaviour is pretty predictable to yourself at least. Some of the structures in your system may well be just in your head rather than made tangible in your external system. Some structures may be intentionally omitted to ensure you can surprise yourself with your system, feeding discovery and wonder.

I can’t tell you how to do PKM, I can show you what does and doesn’t work for me and tell you why I think that is. I will tell you to take PKM very personally, and then some more.

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For some of my notes from long ago I find it helpful to quickly check what weekday a certain date was. I don’t want to go to a website for it that shows me, of which there are several.
I do like making tiny personal tools though.

So I wrote a tiny php script with a webform for my local web server, to tell me the weekday for a given date.

Such small things give me a suprisingly large amount of pleasure to make and see it work. Next step is to do this over the command line or through Alfred, rather than a web interface. Update: found an Alfred workflow that I adapted, which either shows the day or puts it on the clipboard for pasting.

The code is easy as PHP has a function for it.

if ($_POST) {

$dag = $_POST['dag'];
$maand = $_POST['maand'];
$jr = $_POST['jaar'];

$jd=gregoriantojd($maand,$dag,$jr); /*NB this function uses the awkward US date format m/d/y */
echo $dag."-".$maand."-".$jr." was een ".jddayofweek($jd,1);
}

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Obsidian has released a Webclipper for a variety of browsers. Making it easy to get stuff into your notes from your browser is a key thing to make as frictionless as possible. So this is a laudable step.

I’ve been using the Markdownload webclipper for 4 years.

Both allow you to precisely template what gets saved and in which way when you save a page or a selection on a page. That way I can ensure it ends up in my Obsidian notes tool in a shape that is immediately useful inside that environment.

A key difference is that Markdownload saves to the file system, it simply puts a text file with an .md file extension in a folder I designated, and that is the same folder Obsidian looks for my notes. It can also save through Obsidian though. It’s independent and useful regardless of Obsidian, because of it.

The Obsidian webclipper saves through Obsidian, I suspect so you can leverage whatever you have set up in Obsidian for incoming material. It brings Obsidian to the front and does the saving, and if you want opens the note to continue there. In my case it meant the default template for new notes got applied by the templater plugin, overwriting the material I tried to save. The settings of the Obsidian webclipper does not have the option to save to a folder, bypassing Obsidian.
This to me introduces an unneeded dependency (and the need to figure out suppressing my default template inside Obsidian so it doesn’t overwrite incoming webclippings). To me the fact that Obsidian is a viewer on top of regular text notes on my hard drive is valuable because I can use the files and manipulate them in other tools. I daily read and write those notes outside of Obsidian. It seems many others don’t realise this fully as there is the strong tendency to want and expect Obsidian to do everything (even though the dev team handily shifted that urge to the developers of plugins).

I will stick with the Markdownload webclipper for now.

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Reading Bob Doto’s recent book on his note making and writing practices, he explained how he uses his Luhmann-style alphanumeric numbering of notes as a way to spot where a richer grouping is emerging as a possible starting point for his writing. It made me ask, how to spot similar patterns in my digital notes without that numbering system?

Alphanumeric numbering

The alphanumeric numbering basically works like this: When you start your notes collection, you number the notes from the very first one. Say you start with your first two notes on two different topics, A and B. For Topic A, the first note you give the number 1. Topic B’s first note 2. Then for each new note, you decide where to place it in the existing collection. If you think it’s connected to Topic A, it may become 1a. A few notes down the line on other topics you may make a note you place in 1b. Then some time later you have a note you want to place directly after 1a. but not after 1b, so you number it 1a1, etc. Key here is that the numbering system doesn’t give a premade structure where you need to slot a new note in an existing hole (unlike library numbering systems). The numbering system merely means you must choose a first place where you place a new note, intentionally making a first connection to an existing note and number it accordingly. For physical note making systems on index cards this is I think basically the only way to do it, if you don’t want to use a predefined structure (and you don’t because structure is emergent from working with your notes, a knowledge output, not an administrative tool), and do want a navigable and explorable system.

Alphanumeric numbering to detect growth in your system

At the other end of his PKM system, where Doto creates writings using the material he collected over time, the alphanumeric system helps him in finding potential things to write about. Topics where there are lots of notes, accumulated over some period of time, will show up as denser parts of his alphanumeric system. Say in Topic B’s number 2 branch above, a year later there are just 1 or 2 new notes. 2.1 and 2.2. That is a signal Topic B wasn’t an interest that gained any depth that year. But say that note number 1a is now a grouping of a dozen notes, 1a1-1 and a further forking set below it, and 1a2 has some, and there’s 1a3 with no further notes attached. Clearly something happened there in the intervening time. Your attention attached a range of notes to that first starting point 1a, and perhaps it means you have something to write there to bring those notes together. It’s like a grape bunch on a vine. Vine 2 hasn’t grown any grapes let alone any bunches of them, but Vine 1a has. And there may be other grape bunches, bigger, smaller, elsewhere. You choose a bunch to make some wine, i.e. inspecting and reflecting on that grouping of notes and then writing.

On not having alphanumeric numbering in my system

My notes are not numbered that way, although they do contain a timestamp. They’re not numbered because I have a digital notes collection, in which it is easy to make links between notes. I add the time stamp both for unique titles (‘Some good summarising title 20241018125808’ is different from ‘Some good summarising title 20020424125820’ despite the same title text) and to glance from the title from which period in my activities something comes. My notes always have a link to another already existing note, like the alphanumeric system, I always intentionally choose a first connection. Without it, it is not really a navigable and explorable system. However, over time or at the time of first writing, I may add additional links from that note to others. It is not always visible which link was the first link, the equivalent of choosing the first position in the alphanumeric system.

On the output side this means I cannot easily spot where the density of my notes has grown to a budding grape bunch. I can see which notes are most heavily connected, using the Obsidian graph, but that’s equivalent to pointing a lot to a main branch, and the more I point to a single note the less meaningful it is, as it becomes more of a generic category essentially.

So what are my options to detect emerging dense spots in my notes?

The alphanumeric grape bunch is basically a group of one or more short or longer lineages originating from a single point somewhere in the total.
Those lineages are present in my notes too, but not easy to spot. Sometimes I make deliberate chains (Note B linking to more abstract concept A, and to more tangible example C, making an A-B-C train of thought), but not often. Lineages would be easier to spot if links in notes had metadata, like the time of linking. This would both show in a note the first link (the first place it was put in), and allow across notes the exploration of the sequence in which notes x, y and z got connected by looking at note creation data and incoming linkages. Links are information objects in their own right, and have different aspects like direction(s), character, intensity, a time dimension and a versioning history, none of which is captured in my system (nor in those of others I saw). Links can also grow into new notes. A link between A and B over time and through reflection deepening in meaning, necessitating its own note to express it with enough atomicity.

Might local graphs help?

The local graph of a note in my Obsidian tool can provide a bit of lineage, by looking at the vicinity of a single note limited to incoming links and set to a depth of 2 or higher. It’s not visually obvious though, it doesn’t jump out. In the following graph (incoming links, depth 2, with ‘Links as information object’ as the branching off point) I colored the different branches. Note that the title for each node/note has a timestamp showing how much time there was between one note and the following added to the lineage. Some notes have the same date, meaning they were written in the more or less the same sitting. Also note that some older notes link to some newer notes, indicating I edited the note to include a new link to a newer note)

What also emerges from this image is that several ‘lineages’ connect further ‘down’. Essentially they create a loop, a circle of notes. There are many more, and I think they are a sign of density (one that alphanumeric numbering doesn’t have), yet like lineages not easy to spot. Two examples are shown below. One circle based on a depth of 2, another with depth 3.

While this type of visualisation isn’t useless, it’s also not obviously useful in this case. Would there be other ways to search for things like “lines longer than 3 notes, with more than 1 branching off point with at least 2 notes depth”.

Do you have ways to spot emerging clusters outside of alphanumeric numbering and graphs in your notes? As a suggestion for your potential next writing?

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I am trying out the Books Search plugin for Obsidian. I keep notes on all books I’ve read, own or have come across. I add meta data to those notes manually. The Books Search plugin helps make that easier by picking up that meta data from Google Books through their API. You install the plugin through the Community Plugin list, and can then add an API key. Without that key, after a few tries you will get an error message.

The plugin documentation does however not state how to connect the plugin to that Google API.

These are the steps I took after a bit of searching:

  • In the Google cloud console first create a project. (A Google account is needed)
  • In the same console, under credentials, click create credentials and create an API key. Copy that key and save it in the settings of the Obsidian Books Search plugin.
  • In the same console, under Enable APIs & Services, enable the Google Books API.
  • Go back to Credentials, edit your API key, select Restrict Key under API restrictions, and select from drop down list the Google Books API you’ve just enabled. (If it doesn’t show any APIs to choose, you have not enabled any APIs yet.) Now the key works only for the Google Books API.
  • Ignore the warning in the console about OAuth consent, as this is not needed (the books API is accessible without authorisation, and you’re also not building an app for others to use.)

Using the Book Search plugin I notice it is by default restricted to English books, not finding titles in other languages that Google Books does have in its lists. The locale settings in the plugin allow me to switch language before a search in the search form through a very long drop down menu, but doing that (or doing the same search for each of three or four languages) quickly negates the effectivity gain the plugin provides.

It is unclear from the Google API documentation if locale can be set to multiple languages.

Probably not, given Google’s long history of interpreting multilingual as serial monolingual (see this 2007 presentation at Google by Stephanie Booth pointing this same stuff out), ignoring that multilingual people tend to change languages throughout their activities even for just a single word or short phrase. (I don’t have Dutch, English or German days or topics, in the case of books I may want to find the German original of an English translation, or want to search for a specific thing in French because I know it exists, while also interested in any Dutch translation that might be available or the Italian original. My notes are always in multiple languages.)