Graph-positional locking

I’ve been thinking greatly about what value obsidian adds once you have some enormous amounts of nodes, and I’m starting to realise once the number of notes exceeds what you can ‘recognise’ and remember, it becomes very difficult to figure out where to connect a new piece of information.

ie; If your system is that when you add a note, you always link it to a pre-existing idea. Once you have 10-20k notes, How do you find the exact note to link the idea to? You could use search features etc, but you’re left with the same problems, what keywords? What tags?

Do you even remember what’s in the notes? How do you know which of the 20,000 to go back to read today? etc.

I think being able to ‘lock-geographically’ certain nodes in the graph view, or even lock ALL of them, it could have an insanely interest effect on huge graphs. It could allow you to inadvertently build a visualised roman-room technique of your knowledge.

Human minds can’t keep track of 20k individual chunks of text, but they can keep track of that much location information.
eg. I know that this particular note is top-left of the MoC, three branches down, past the X cluster, and the 3 point node that looks like a chicken’s foot.

Being able to visually remember ‘where’ your information is located I think would be a completely game-changer in terms of merging your obsidian ‘brain’ with your own brain, and allow you to subliminally cultivate a roman room of sorts of ALL of your notes.

Being able to talk about the ‘passage’ between topic X, and topic Y as a consistent ‘geographical’ feature of your map, would provide your mind an extremely strong background context to all your knowledge that would grow with you adding to it organically.

I don’t know what the technical complexities of doing this are for the graph view. But I think this would be a feature that is far more than just a ‘visual-coolness’ improvement.

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That is indeed a relevant question or request and is in my opinion related to usage of links and/or tags:

  • Links: Thematic affinity or ›proximity‹ of specific notes could/should be realised using links with different ›weight‹, i.e. connectivity strenght. At the moment, there’s only one ›type‹/weight of links. This way, one could group/connect specific notes with one another. This could also provide the possibility to realise note sequences (Zettelfolgen) as it existed in Luhmann’s early workflow process.
  • Tags: Normally you would tag notes with thematic affinity. There’s also the possibility (which I strongly recommend) to use nested tags. As far as I know there’s no possibility to activate a specific »force« for notes that share the same (sub-)tag. Such a feature could solve your problem: The strength of such an additional force would depend on the ›proximity‹ to another tag.
    • Sharing the same subtag would result in a strong force.
    • Sharing the same main tag would result in a moderate force.
    • Not sharing any tags wouldn’t result in any force.

By the way: It is possible to color the notes in the graph according to a specific tag.

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Perhaps you could use a hash or even something like the Word2vec algorithm on the title of the note to calculate the coordinates, since the title rarely changes?

Ideally, when a new note is added, as few notes as possible should change their position as little as possible. If the user changes the position of a note manually, the position should be saved.