This is something Iām grappling with. My work entails writing analytical summaries of economic news and policy every week or so, which will be based on a variety of inputs: mostly policy announcements, business articles, data releases, etc.
Most of those sources are digital and online, and often brief (rather than long, academic articles, although those are useful background for most topics). I like to make a note for every source and write a few sentence summary, and maybe longer notes if particularly interesting. For years Iāve found this to be a useful way to absorb this information better, well before Obsidian. Every week or two Iāll ascertain the key themes and write a proper report on them.
What Obsidian offers is the chance of better way of connecting these trends, not just within a given week (which isnāt so hard, given proximity), but perhaps over time. The challenge is Iām collecting dozens of new articles (references/literature notes) per week, sometimes even a dozen a day. If Iām not judicious with linking and tags, they become so numerous as to be nearly meaningless. This is looking especially daunting if I make links to nouns, people, places, etc which overlap so often across the theme of references that Iām going over.
Iāve been mulling this over, so havenāt tried it fully yet, but Iām thinking my āreferenceā notes should only link to an idea or question note, not to each other and not to nouns/places/people. This helps cut down clutter in the note cloud/graph and focuses my attention on questions I want to answer, either in the next week or two, or perhaps that need more research long term. Perhaps another/additional point here would be to try to limit links from a reference note to only a few (e.g. 3), just to impose some discipline on linking only the most relevant points. The problem with this approach is that it starts out very hierarchical, but I hope eventually would start to be more organic as different questions link to each other and old references start to inspire new questions.
For nouns/people/places, perhaps tags are the best approach - something I was opposed to initially since tags donāt graph. But Iām finding the graph becomes very unmanageable quickly if one is tagging to liberally (i.e. if I have a reference note that is only 200 words, but has 10 tags in it to all the nouns etc that are relevant to my work).
Iāll be experimenting with this more in the next few weeks and will report back any progress.
