Hi folks. I’m trying to get my undergraduate students to be mindful about how they’re taking notes from academic literature. I like atomic notes because when I start compiling things together, the paper, the article almost assembles itself. This experience I think would be useful for my students, because the terror of the blank page really harms their writing.
All that to say, I’ve put together a ‘starter vault’ for them that tries to keep things fairly simple (not using the language of ‘literature notes’ because that confuses the issue). Hypothesis-to-obsidian, zotero-to-obsidian, some project management with kanban boards.
Just started last night, but thought maybe folks’d find it interesting.
I’m following the Youtube channel History4Today of Dr. Dan Allosso (History4Today - Notes, Research, Writing - YouTube). He and his history students also work with Obsidian. Just in case you don’t know him yet. Lots of very good videos.
EDIT: read your starter vault. Thanks for explaining OCR in Obsidian.
The OCR template is quite neat too in that it shows a way of piping the results from external tools into Obsidian. I adapted it today to run a python tf-idf similarity script -details here- and I can imagine using it with something like trafilatura for webscraping-to-notes.
sure, just fork the repo and then have at it! Re the ocr script, someone left an issue in the repo about getting it working on a Linux box. I don’t have a Linux box to explore that issue with, but - in history at least - I’ve maybe only encountered one student in the last decade using Linux. Good luck!
New to using Obsidian in this way. Will this work on a Chromebook with ChromeOS? Seems like it should since Chrome is unix-based.
It seems like a great resource for history students. Even if they don’t use Obsidian, the templates provide great examples of how to do research and note-taking and the importance of linking related notes. Thanks for this!