I’m a pastor and embarking on some larger study projects using resources from Logos Bible Software, Accordance, Kindle and print books.
I’m looking for the best way to store my study notes to develop them into preaching, teaching or written articles. I want to reuse some material for different contexts, but want the material to scale as I add new study material.
As an example, I am just embarking on studying the Bible book of Revelation, so my notes will need to be able to track many moving parts (different interpretive positions on the same passage, OT allusions, symbols, etc.).
Both Obsidian (which I have) and Heptabase (which I’ve never used) have been recommended. I don’t really like Obsidian and am cautious in something that might be high maintenance in terms of plugins. I tend to think better visually with mindmaps, but that’s only a preference.
Does anyone have experience with these two apps to be able to comment? I’m also open to other solutions. I’m not an academic so won’t be dealing with pdf articles. I’m just working with books in the above mentioned applications and print.
Seems that you want to link notes, perhaps add some metadata to describe or categorize the note, and transclude snippets from one note into another, as well as organize the notes, and export them.
It’s easy for us here to expound on what we do, but it’s what you do that matters.
I have used Heptabase occasionally, but not extensively. If I were starting today, I would probably use it instead of Obsidian. You need to feel what’s right for you. And what’s right for you might not be a single app, but working across multiple apps.
What I suggest doing is define a small project for yourself that reflects the tasks and outcomes you want from software, then perform that project – including note taking, linking, other imports, and export – in Obsidian, Heptabase, and other products. For example, take a look at MarginNote and Capacities.
If you’re working exclusively on MacOS, I highly recommend Tinderbox for a project like this. The quite significant downside is that it takes time and work to get to grips with it, but if you do there is, IMO, nothing better. It’s not cloud-dependent, if that matters, and a one-time fee gets you a year of updates and a lifetime licence.
It’s subtitled “The Tool for Notes”, and that’s very accurate
As I’ve got older, I’ve come to strongly dislike complexity and many moving parts. I like seeing things visually. I enjoy mindmaps, but my current project is too complex.
I have Tinderbox, but find that the maintenance of attributes, agents, prototypes and code not trivial and can be very distracting from study and extremely frustrating.
Another one to consider is Muse - it’s visual, and intentionally limited in terms of options. It syncs across Mac and IPad using its own proprietary sync solution which is incredibly fast.
The graphical layout and pathing of notes in Heptabase is how I prefer to imagine the interrelationships among notes. I’ve never been satisfied with Obsidian’s canvas and graph views. At this point, however, my Obsidian vaults are large and intertwined, and Heptabase would mean starting over again.
Katie
(PS: Curio is reminiscent of Heptabase and has a much richer set of tools to embellish notes and work with graphical elements. It is worth a trial.)
Are you interested in using AI tools, i.e. to help research the notes, or scripting tools, i.e. to help automate processing of the notes? For example, in my brief look at the Heptabase website, the up-front promotion is clearly about the ease in using AI tools, not about the ease in the manual processing steps needed to store content, annotate over it, and make connections within it.
Also, given a preference to work visually, you may be swayed more toward apps that allow you to put text content into boxes, label/tag or add notes to the boxes, and process the boxes based on their tags and notes rather than apps that follow the more traditional text-based note processing methods. If so, I second the recommendation for Curio. It is rich in its ability to allow you to create visual representations for content (text figures), label/tag the text figures, add notes to the text figures, make hyperlinks and references between text figures, and generate layouts (e.g. mind maps) of the text figures on a canvas.
Have you tried Scrivener? You can download the full version to try for free.
Scrivener is designed to store your notes with your written work. It has a text editor, supports footnotes, and has both an outline and a corkboard view, which I’ve used as a visual mind-map, but Scrivener also works well with Scapple also from Literature and Latte and meant to be a mind map sort of tool.
You don’t have to use the long-form editor part and can just use the notes aspect.
Scrivener is filled with tools but you can use what you want and ignore what you don’t want. There are lots of videos to give you an idea of your options.
Not really. If I need AI work doing I would use Claude. I’m after the ability to build a notes repository from about 50 books/commentaries/dictionaries/theological works. These will have overlap. There are currently 6 interpretive views and some notes will fit more than one. My individual notes will need to be visible in multiple groups depending on topic, passage, interpretive view etc.
You can build a story by assembling and arranging many pieces of content piece-by-piece into the story. Or you can build a story about one piece by describing how that one piece is referenced in all possible stories about it.
Curio is far more effective for doing the former (although it can be used for the latter with some practice).
I understand better, now, what you’re looking to do. As mentioned, I use Obsidian, which is my “canonical” notes repository. Separately, I use Curio for analysis, correlation, etc. A feature of Curio is to “watch” filesystem folders (i.e., index), from which notes can be dragged onto Curio whiteboards so that you can edit the note in Curio, and the edits show up in the original file in Obsidian, or vice versa. In Curio you can also copy a text figure and paste it elsewhere as a synced figure. This enables replicating notes all over your project. Combining these features in Curio you have access and edit capability (optionally) to the singe canonical note in the Obsidian database. This enables write-once-use-multiple-times.
I never knew you could bolt Curio onto an Obsidian database. That is very interesting! I’ve never absolutely gelled with Canvas or Excalidraw – would you say that Curio offers something distinct from both these ways to visually connect notes via the Obsidian plugins?
I tend to think I’d like to be more of a visual thinker, and then when I explore these tools after a while they tend to fall by the wayside for me (also e.g. MindNode) as I revert back to text and outlining. But I do think structurally a lot and relating ideas is my bread and butter. Curio is tempting!
And @svsmailus, I’ll add that the outline view in Scrivener is fantastic, as is the ability to open research notes while also writing. An additional advantage of Scrivener is that it is excellent for handling all sorts of writing, including series, e.g., a sermon series, lesson series, etc.
Two things to note, which may not matter to you: 1) Dropbox is required for syncing to an iPad, and 2) the iPad version is usable for adding text, but not much else.
Hello @svsmailus. I’m also interested in watching the answers to your questions, since I’d like to chose something similar: an infinite whiteboard app, prefereably where I can freely place various tables and link concepts between cells or cards - via wikilinks, visual arrows, tags, etc.
It needs to be solid and resilient (to not get slower as the info grows). Ideally (if possible), e2ee, synced to an iOS companion app, offline use, small learning curve.
Unfortunatelly, I have more questions than answers. (And Claude may be already “creating whatever we want”, but I’m late on this).
(A) For higher privacy (e2ee or local): Obsidian (Canvas? Excalidraw?), Curio - or even some future version of Apple Freeform powered with AI?
(B) Not e2ee: Heptabase? (it can run local if you don’t use their iOS app. And I guess it is on their roadmap to offer e2ee on a per-file basis).
(C) Miro?
(D) I digress, but do you know ATLASti? I discovered it a few days ago, but it impressed me so much that this is the second time I recommend it today here on MPU! (I’m not affiliated with them). It can automatically create a live index of “terms and concepts” extracted from a vast number of different sources. (And do much more). It may help with the “track many moving parts” side of your message, but in a different way.
I’d love to know if anyone here could share their experience with it. It is used for deep research, but it looks very user friendly (even for non-coders).
Here is the video through which I discovered ATLASti. (It is from 2023, but it describes the interesting workflow of a PhD student). (ATLASti appears at 12’26”)
