Do you happen to have an annotated bibliography or similar that you could share? I happened to read The Science of Managing Our Digital Stuff and even though it is 2015, found it helpful and have been wondering where to go to learn more.
That looks like a neat book, thanks for the tip! Can I ask for your top two takeaways?
I don’t have a bibliography, though I would point to Joel Chan’s work as an illustrative example of what’s happening lately:
And a simple Google Scholar search for “knowledge management” returns quite a few heavily-cited articles: Google Scholar
The trick with conventional knowledge management scholarship is that it’s heavily business-focused. So, be prepared to read between the lines for application beyond the office.
Finally, a group of us have been reading through a new book called Knowledge Architectures. The book is alright—fairly abstract so far (we’re at Chapter 6) but the discussions have been great.
Feel free to join in the below Discord, where you can find collected notes and recordings of presentations on each chapter.
Just an update on my use of Obsidian. What really made it click for me is the Daily Notes plugin. Before I discovered Obsidian, my normal workflow was to have a note for each project I was working on. When I had a meeting for that project, I would open up that note and type in the meeting notes. Now I see I was doing it all wrong. Using the Daily Notes feature, I have a note file for each day. When I have a meeting related to a project, I will have a link to that project note. Now the magic happens when I go back to the project file. I see in the linked mentions that the project was discussed in a meeting on May 18 and May 24.
I also realize that my normal note taking workflow was to have a few large notes. But now I’m following the practice of having shorter, more focused notes that can then be linked to each other.
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@jcarucci Wow, this is great! This is the first explanation of the Daily Notes feature that made practical sense for my workflow—thanks for sharing this! I think I’ll turn that feature on. 
How do you find the level of content that is revealed in the Backlinks section? Personally, the fact that I have to keep clicking the ‘Show more content’ arrows in order to be able to scan the contents to find the daily note entry I was looking for adds too much friction.
I have reverted back to entering daily project notes directly onto the relevant Project Note itself.
Maybe I am not structuring the ‘block’ in the Daily Note most effectively. I have used the [[Project Name Page]] as a heading and also tried with it ‘inline’ in a block but neither way provided satisfactory result.
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This sounds like you have one mega note for one project. That must be a really long project note.
The way I structure my project is one folder per project and inside the folder, there will be many notes related to the project. I am trying to see how Daily Note will work for me.
Thanks very much for the invitation and links!
Given that
one takeaway is that Bergman and Whittaker distinguish between “traditional” models of information management which are designed for public use, or at least for multiple users (which may be where more of the scholarship is) and a “curation” model where individuals are responsible for organizing their own information and users’ subjective perspective can be leveraged in the data structuring and retrieval. This book is them developing this “user subjective” approach.
One of their big claims is that navigation is less cognitively demanding than search. In 2016, they concluded that this pointed to a largely folder-based system as the way to go (PARA might have been based on their work, I don’t know enough to tell). Today, I think this points to David Sparks’ contextual computing.
Getting back to the thread, I think if we consider the role Obsidian plays in David’s system, or if we simply consider how Obsidian allows navigational structures to scale, we can see why many people are excited about it. (And about apps like it.)
At the same time, Bergman and Whittaker also claimed that shallow (~3 deep) and wide (10-20) may be a sweet spot. For many use cases that may be enough.
Perhaps the most charming part of the book is the discussion of the benefits of “piling” versus “filing.” Even though the book is dated, I think it is full of useful insights on the psychology of information management, along with some basic practical principles.
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Thanks for the report back! It definitely sounds interesting.
This is a fascinating debate. A counterpoint: @LucCogZest has advocated for developing a personal “grammar” (with respect to text expansion tools). I think the idea of a simple grammar can extend to other aspects of organizing.
For instance, I use △ as a prefix to indicate that a file is a project note. Then, when I search (especially with autocomplete-based search features), I can immediately filter by all projects. In this sense, I use prefixing as a way of doing a kind of navigation-search hybrid.
Dendron demonstrates this concept further, though I think it goes a bit too far.
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trial lawyer, here. I try cases, draft pleadings, write briefs, etc.
a predicate to usefulness in my world is, whatever the product is, it needs to be used often. if it isn’t, there’s always the return to the learning curve when you get back to it. in the end, this indulgence is a waste of time and effort.
it doesn’t work for me. meaning, it adds nothing to my productivity in any way, that isn’t present elsewhere.
I don’t dislike it. I just doesn’t serve me in any way I can detect.
EDIT:
I’ve reflected a bit.
in my world, the information needed most often is case law on specific topics.
case law tends to update itself, and concepts are “word” specific. obsidian or linking systems don’t improve on what search can already do, and the linking system in markdown requires maintenance, whereas searching does not.
in sum, the search capability is good enough.
for example, assume the topic is “seizure under the 4th amendment”.
a lawyer may have 25 or so briefs, and dozen’s more monitions in the database. they’ll be found in an instant, and there’s little that markdown [obsidian] can offer here in my opinion.
the relational diagram, or whatever it’s called in obsidian. it has no value in what I do. “So what” if a certain pleading is an outlier in relation to other pleadings or documents.
I’m always willing to learn, but if it’s just cool factor without also blowing my skirt up, it ain’t for me.
I think my comments are more related to markdown than obsidian.
I’d love to hear from other lawyers about the utility of markdown. I’m sure some find it handy and I’d like to know how they use it.
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Not too long ago I thought that search and tags were the replacement for hierarchy. But both suffer from lack of planning. If your file-naming system isn’t well-structured you will struggle to remember which words to search for. If your folder structure isn’t well thought-out you will struggle to remember where you saved something. I have found the Johnny Decimal system to truly help in both regards, and it is shallow and wide. Details here: https://johnnydecimal.com/
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Thank you for this. I appreciate the old filing system and so, this is a big reminder why it works and how I should start thinking about making my Obsidian file/vault the same way. The Vault will be the Buckets while the folders will be the Categories
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Another update, I’m using Obsidian full time at work now for all my note taking. What I discovered this week is having a graph of people I work with is really helpful. So now I have meetings and links to pages with small blurbs about who the person is and links to their manager and others they work with. Now I’m building up a list of people I can look at in graph view. This visualization part of Obsidian is turning out to be bigger than I thought it would be. It helps to see the big picture.
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The Juggl plugin adds the ability to visualize some metadata (such as link types) in a special graph view, in case that’s handy.
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Sorry for the delay - please find my example vault including templates here:
Git doesn’t seem to like all those empty folders, so I took a screenshot of my folder structure instead.
As I mentioned before, this is all very simple and very work-in-progress. I do not yet have a very useful tagging system established, for example, and the folder structure I’m showing here (in parts) is also not stable yet. However, this is what I currently work with almost daily.
Some additional information is included in the Readme.md-file. Hope it helps!
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Are the numbers for each folder just so you can control the sort order?
Yes, it‘s for that reason. I did also read up about additional benefits of a consistent numbering scheme (e.g. Johnny Decimal) but to be honest, if there was a universal, hidden meta data for ordering, I‘d use that instead of numbers.
You can filter the graph (and even color it) in any way you can think of (it uses the search syntax).
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You can open a local graph as well, which gives you a control for how far out you want to see from the currently active note. I found a YouTube video demonstrating it (though I haven’t watched it myself): Obsidian Basics: Local Graph (0.8.3+) - YouTube
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It surely would.
I tag all my daily notes with #daily and then use -tag:#daily in the filter to remove all daily notes.
Or one might also just use -path:Daily if they are storing all daily notes in a folder called Daily.