Books & their marginalia. All in .md files

[Mummel]

Partially a showcase, partially a “how could this be improved” / “tell me if I’m doing something stupid” thread. It’s really a little too time-consuming and probably on the stupid side.

A picture of this stupid monstrosity I’ve created.

Jeffery Kaplan introduced me to the idea of marginalia, content in the margins of a book’s pages. He used the term to describe a specific study technique which involves writing a “snowballing” summary of every paragraph in a given chapter, typically in the margins of the book itself.

I’m a data hoarder to put it mildly, and there are two things driving me:

• Computers love unobfuscated plaintext
• I use Obsidian for knowledge management, not task management

As for what I’ve done here, well, look, those are my notes on this text linked in the text itself. In Obsidian. I don’t like highlighting everything to take notes, it looks terribly ugly IMO, but Markdown footnotes are used for footnotes included in the original text, so I had to do my own thing.

Each note is in its own file and I’ve avoided using block IDs since those are VERY not a part of Markdown spec and not likely to standardize soon. Instead I name the notes as paragraph references. 1, 1.1 ,1.2 and so on, and splitting them into “summary” notes with an S and more stream-of-consciousness “marginalia” notes with an M. To avoid turning whole paragraphs of text into links, I display the links as special unicode characters ᵐ and ˢ.

As for how I got the book in there, it’s mainly the brilliant Epub Importer plugin preceded by cleaning up the file a bit in Calibri (no, really, I use regex to remove metadata tags the plugin tries to convert as links). You can really get any of your Epubs in there in a manner I’d at least call ethical (a.k.a. I paid for them).

What’s currently a little weird:

• The note files rely on the folder structure you see here, with a Marginalia folder for each chapter. Their names aren’t actually unique. I don’t like UID-style file names but I’m not a fan of file path links either for readability’s sake, I don’t know.

• Actually making these little files and inserting these little links into the text is kind of a PITA. I suppose Templater could help, I really need to get on learning to use it.

• The Ebook Importer plugin is a pretty straight 1-1 conversion so footnotes are, as in EPUBs, stuck in a different file and don’t work until I fix them manually. Bleh.

So, again, probably way too much work to be practical or sane long-term, but I like the general idea too much to give it up just yet.

[Stray-Sticky-Note]

I recently watched Kaplan’s videos too (perhaps within the last month) and have been wondering how to incorporate the concept into my reading. I started doing it with pencil in a book I own randomly last week and quite like it. I think I would consider doing a summary of my marginalia (to make a literature note) in Obsidian if I continued this way. But, I find writing paragraph summaries in the margins to be an uncomfortable task.

As for your workflow, I feel like I would be overwhelmed by the idea of trying to make up so many notes and so much structure for the notes (I may not have totally wrapped my head around yours, though). That’s also partially why I want to do marginalia (literature notes) in Obsidian, though: so I can write things as I process them, then spin off permanent notes from there. Write a lot, keep a little.

[Mummel]

TBF the more I think about it the more I think the way I’m doing it now IS kind of insane, and I’d probably be better off writing just starting with Kaplan’s idea in one file, finishing off with a full summary of the chapter and only keeping that. I still like the idea of my own annotations but I can leave that for stuff other than overly thorough summaries.

[Stray-Sticky-Note]

I like your idea of separating your own annotations from the summarization. I have a Quickadd command to create a new note that links to wherever my cursor was that I intended to use for similar reasons. I try to separate things I think from what authors are trying to say.

IDK if it helps, but you could give each of your summarizations a pithy heading with a tag in it. Then, you could link to the headings in your internal links and have something that is (or seems to be) compliant with the extended Markdown spec.

[Tempyrean]

From what I understand, using a software designed for consuming papers and literature with thought, like zotero mendeley etc, will be better, you can then import the annotations, there are quite a few plugins for that and great detailed videos too by Channels like Danny Hatcher.

[carlaclara]

I feel your pain, being a book dragon myself and a Keeper of Thoughts. I tried many different ways of organizing my booklife myself, and finally settled upon letting someone else do it–I use webinspect’s Simple Bookshelf. He is upgrading it this coming week to work for Bases, amongst other nifty things. So here’s how I organize: I have a page for each book within this setup, and I use it as the book’s home base–notes, last read, DNF, the whole works. Then I set up a simple chart for tracking the next book in series, pictured here, which links to the book pages in question, so I don’t lose my place. The authors’ and illustators’ pages within the system are in my one big People folder, along with everyone else, and the metadata on the book page is clickable.

Here’s the top of one of my book pages, I add the cover as the feature image as well.