Imagine Iāve been reading a 400 page academic text on, say, Iron Age Syracuase. As I read, I take notes in my annotation app, not Obsidian, because itās a physical book and I prefer to use Readwiseās OCR instead of literally typing up all of my quotations. But because itās a long book, it takes me several days, and during that time, I use my resonance calendar to record big-picture impressions that link directly to the source note āTyrants of Syracuse by Jeff Champion.ā
So far, no big deal if I atomize the actual highlights and annotations and stuff later, because I can use the source note as an index and the connections will be maintained.
But then I go ahead and imported all of theq quotes+annotations (from a pdf or kindle or Readwise or whatever; in this case itās Readwise). Iām left with a document that looks something like this:
quote
Note: Annotation
quote
quote
Note: Annotation
quote
quote
itās annoying because itās not really formatted how I like it (and Readwise doesnāt give me the darn page numbers on export, or even separate out which quotes are part of the same section and which paragraphs are on their own, unless thereās an annotation to split them up), which is much more:
ch03p93 descriptive heading
quote
annotation
ch04p103 descriptive heading
quote
annotation
but the process of taking the raw data dump from my pdf or Readwise or whatever and formatting it correctly is significantly easier for me if I just go straight through and fix it without making a bunch of files. I know that there are probably plugins like Workbench and probably Refactor that can split off each section as I go using some sort of hotkey magic, but Iām a teacher, not a programmer, and hotkeys arenāt totally intuitive to me yet. So I go down the list and do it all at once.
But as I go, I realize that my sixth quote and my fifteenth quote address the same topic, so I do create a new note called āunusual uses for greek templesā and embed quote 6 (āch3p23 greek temples were used as banksā) and quote 15 (āch4p30 greek temples were used as a base for raidingā) into it.
I do that as I go, synthesizing thoughts and connecting things and then I get to the end andā¦
ā¦ if I use the Note Refactor plugin to turn all of those subheadings into individual notes with descriptive names, none of my synthesis notes will point to the right place anymore and my embeds will be broken.
Now, yeah, I could do it ārightā the first time and pull each individual quote and annotation out into their own file, but thatās a lot of extra point-and-click that is the whole reason the Note Refactor plugin exists ā because that kind of thing is a bigger timesink than just doing it all in one file. Plus, I kind of like having everything right there in one place for me to look at it as a block while Iām still working with it.
I could also wait until everything is formatted and then refactor it into atomized notes and then create the synthesis notesā¦ but what if I forget one of my ideas? And even if I donāt, now Iām doing the same cognitive work twice ā because itās not like I can āturn offā the part of my brain that notices those connections originally.
So one way I do twice as much work but wind up with more āvisibleā atomic notes in my file bar, and the other I do half as much work but have to utilize search more heavily to find my notes again.
I decided Iād prefer to rely on searchā¦ but in a perfect world, when Note Refactor splits my long litnote, the links to what used to be headers and are now their own notes would get updated. But my understanding is that from a programming perspective thatās a pretty heavy lift.
