I recently got into smart notes and Obsidian. I think they can be a great way to organize your thinking and research. Any other users here?
I recently got into smart notes and Obsidian. I think they can be a great way to organize your thinking and research. Any other users here?
Can you say more about how that works?
Do you just use Zotero to get the meta data and organise your PDFs then export and read everything in Obsidian?
Or do you read and make notes, gather quotes, etc, in Zotero, then export your notes to Obsidian before re-writing these into something coherent?
If it’s the latter, what’s the advantage over e.g. using the Word plugin to drop Zotero notes directly into a Word document? Is it that you don’t have to use Word (admittedly, that’s a big advantage)?
If that’s the case, can you use Obsidian to make your final drafts? Or do you still have to move to a word processor for that?
Or (sorry, I’m quite curious about this!) do you read in Zotero, highlighting relevant quotes in your research, then export those quotes into Obsidian, where you add your own analysis, etc, and then either finish the draft in Obsidian or export your Obsidian notes to e.g. Word to make a final draft?
Or (last one!) are you talking about making notes for e.g. studying rather than while researching for/writing a specific paper?
I’m rather old fashioned, see, so I tend to make hand-written notes in a notebook or (in pencil) directly in books or, occasionally, on a PDF (but I can’t keep track of those, so I avoid it most of the time). Then I move straight to Word and write, re-write, and re-write ad nauseam until I’m done. This is a bulky process so I’m looking for a more streamlined system that helps me keep track of notes. I’ve started to use Scrivener again for this but that doesn’t help me get my hand-written notes onto the screen.
To answer most of these questions:
I organize and read everything in Zotero (with the night mode plug in), and make highlights for quotes, very brief annotations, or add #lu (look-up) for citations I want to search up in bulk later. Then I use the Zotero Integration plugin to pull the quotes, with citations and annotations into obsidian (into a note with a standardized title like: lastnameTitleYEAR).
I’ve gone back and forth between using Zotero to “Create Note from Annotations” and then importing that, versus importing it directly from the Zotero pdf. I’ve been using the latter though because it comes with hyperlinks that bring me directly to the location of the highlight in zotero from obsidian. But I think you can create a custom template for the first solution that gives you the same thing. I still do the “create note from annotation” even if I don’t import it because I have a custom search that shows me every pdf with a note attached, which means I’ve read and annotated.
I also write out some notes digitally with a pen on my laptop in onenote (I kind of hate it, but it works) and then insert that pdf into the Obsidian note. But if I ever need that in plain text, I have to retype it because my handwriting is shit and the recognition software needs too much babysitting. Retyping can be helpful though.
I wish zotero’s pdf reader supported pen annotations and clipped them into images on export, but unfortunately it doesn’t. Xodo works well with a pen, but fuck if you can export that easily, and I’d rather not comb through pdfs to find notes.
I fucking hate word. I’ve been considering learning LaTeX, but I just don’t need like 99% of its functionality, especially not now, and markdown is easy and useful enough. I like how obsidian lets me see my notes in folders, and then opening them in tabs quickly. Way easier than managing a bunch of word docs. Its search functionality is also great. There is a ton you can do with obsidian in terms of hyperlinking to other notes, or specific sections of them. Like, lets say you have a note of annotations, and you have added a heading (#) to a certain section, you can type [[notename#heading]] and it will link directly to that part of the note. You can also pull that section from one note to be displayed in another using ![[notename#heading]] and it remains editable. All of this will autofill too, so you can do “![[no” and notename will come up, hit tab, #, and it will show you the headings you can use. Take a peek at the documentation to see if it would be useful to you: https://help.obsidian.md/Home. Like you can even use CSS and embed iframes for whatever reason lol
While it is markdown, it is also partially WYSIWYG as it will display the formatting right away. So it looks quite nice while working. You can definitely export markdown to word (or anything else) when needed. But obsidian may be an unnecessary step for you? I’d play around with it and see if it is useful though. There are a few good videos out there, but jesus christ, most people seem to be using it to pull shitty self-help articles as though that is in any way useful.
Unfortunately, when I needed this workflow the most, I did not have it. I just did everything in word. Currently, my primary use case for this workflow is personal research, so most just stays in Obsidian. I usually just export right to pdf when I need to for work, or I just reference in obsidian for speaking/taking notes.
I use obsidian for everything now though, it is my primary note app for anything I need, from pulling annotations to shopping lists. Its one of the best designed and most useful pieces of software I have ever used, and I barely even go past the surface features.
Do you use Zotero? It does such a great job at managing metadata for how janky it is under the hood. The firefox plugin lets me grab papers and metadata very easily, and categorize them on the spot. It will also redirect to a library proxy which is nice. It has basic RSS for seeing what journals have published recently and you can add it to your library directly from Zotero (can’t remember if it will use the proxy or if that only works with open access.) Also, being able to search the contents of all the pdfs is honestly amazing. I think windows search allows it, but is way less efficient. I use the zotfile plugin to use a cloud service to sync everything between devices too, instead of paying them for that.
edit: wow, you can hold control and hover over a note or link in obsidian and it will preview it in a pop up. Can’t believe I didn’t know that lol
If you are learning LaTeX, you might want to check out typst. There’s a plug-in to use it with Obsidian that’s under development, though it seems functional.
I was tired and frustrated with all the bloat that came with LaTeX. The syntax was annoying, and things constantly broke. I’ve been using it for almost a decade and I started off by writing a research report in secondary school, then did resumes, more research assignments, etc. Presently I’m working on a timeline package and a sort modular resume that will make it easier to tailor towards different jobs depending on their requirements.
I really suggest you take a look. It’s in its early stages and developments are coming along very quickly. The community discord is very helpful and enthusiastic, filled to the brim with brilliant people in disparate fields with all sorts of use cases. There’s stuff for music chords, 3D renders, circuit diagrams, slideshows, several theses, and so on.
Cool, thanks I’ll check that out! I’ve been tempted to learn, I just don’t work with math and that is what it has always seemed to me to be for.
I primarily use indesign for final typesetting and layout, and for everything including resumes, presentations, etc. I’ve been using it forever so I’m very comfortable with it, but I’ve loved how easy markdown has been to use. Always interested in learning something new though.
Oh InDesign is great. Fiddling around with code can be annoying, for a research paper I wrote in undergrad it took me longer to format it than to actually write it and I ended up doing quite well on it (as well as one can for a lower level biology lab with the expectations that come with it…)