Obsidian Story of the Year 2020 nomination thread

[Silver]

The deadline to nominate is 11:59 pm EST on December 15. Reply in this thread to nominate.

Have you experienced something noteworthy with the help of Obsidian? Did you submit a paper, pass an exam, or collaborate with your child on a project? Nominate your Obsidian story and let people vote for it!

In your reply, please include:

• Your name
• Title of your story (to set up the poll later)
• The story (1,000 characters max, you can link to a longer piece like a blog post if you want)

The deadline to nominate is 11:59 pm EST on December 15. Reply in this thread to nominate.

After the deadline, we’ll compile the results, remove the duplicate entries, and move on to the voting phase.

[tallguyjenks]

Nominating { thanks4playing }

– Obsidian-made publication at the top journal of my field –

From this post in discord

Hi Everyone, I have some great news! I am a PhD candidate in the study of religion of the ancient Mediterranean world, integrating other disciplines like sociology, anthropology, ethnography, etc. I used Obsidian for a brand new research project that turned into a full-length article publication at the top journal of my field! It took me only 3 months from start to finish thanks to Obsidian (most research articles take about 2 years in my field). I’m seriously debating if I should include Obsidian in my acknowledgements lol

[sirlaughalot]

From scattered pieces to creative research

Hi everyone,

• Your name: Jan Schaller | @sirlaughalot
• Title of your story: From scattered pieces to creative research

I currently work for a research project in the field of sociology which examines the exntent of and reasons for the underrepresentation of certain societal groups like migrants in elite positions in Germany. Therefore, we interviewed people who hold top positions, did group discussions with “ordinary” people of different demographic backgrounds, and conducted a survey. All of this in addition to literature, internal discussions, and my own thoughts were scattered across my system with no good way to connect them. Obsidian made this possible. Today, I submitted the first book chapter , coming out of this research, a further article is in the works.

Thanks Obsidian!

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For anyone who is interested in the project (German only at this point): Soziale Integration ohne Elite?

[StefanoCecere]

name: Stefano Cecere
title: BuboLibro - an adventure book for kids by brothers
story:
My 12yo son wanted to create a CYOA (Choose Your Own Adventure) book as gift for his 5yo brother to let him find his birthday present.
I’m a game developer and I know all tools to create interactive fiction (digital and offline), but since i fell in love with Obsidian this spring i felt it could be the best tool to let him develop this story, since Obsidian is easy, free, multiplatform i use Mac he Win, automatic links and backlinks, graph map, inline images, emojis, GitHub cooperation, Publish to test online, YAML metadata, #keywords, we used quite everything!.. i was near also to export the final PDF by Pandoc

we created a blog post and a video to explain this very fun “dad & son 4 bro” month project: https://stefanocecere.com/project/bubolibro/ (sorry it’s in Italian )

PS: the book is opensource to inspire others to create their own stories!

[base]

Name: base (That should suffice for now )
Title: I never chose to write, Obsidian made me write.

I’ll keep it rather short and simple but Obsidian completely transformed my morning. I used to spend my mornings with mindless scrolling through social media, consuming and going nowhere - in essence: I wasted a lot of time in the morning without benefit.

Every morning I’m still looking at a screen. That is unchanged. But I spend my time writing about my thoughts and whatever comes to my mind. This could have been done with pen and paper or any other application but I feel like the simplicity and thus frictionless use of Obsidian is what enabled me to realise the potential my thoughts can have - I just needed to write them down.
Now every morning I am having a conversation with myself - fighting, laughing, improving. This goes as far as random Obsidian sessions in the middle of the night, because I had a thought and that thought had to be transformed in a note, linked and prepared for future discussion.

tl;dr: Obsidian is the application which had the most positive impact on my life without having to force myself to use it!

[akos0215]

Name: Akos Balasko | akos0215
Title: A converter and a conversion - My journey

As a writer, a poet and a coder, I’ve got several projects in parallel, and hence I’ve always been struggling with organising my notes. For years, seriously. Week by week, I found an app, moved there, some days later I found a missing feature, moved back to Evernote (my default note taking tool at that time). And this loop was done for years. My wife loved it.
Then I found Obsidian. As I saw its power, I decided to help others to find their new home here, so I reshaped the converter developed earlier just for myself and I improved it during this year with several features mainly suggested by the community.
Its outcome is absolutely over my expectations. This project showed me the power of OpenSource, I met really kind and helpful guys here and on github, and with their help the converter has grown and now it has more than 100 stars on github.
Last, but not least, as a poet I completed my book of children’s poems this year, and as a writer I started the research phase of my non-fiction adult book(s). All done in Obsidian, what makes me surprised every day when I recognise hidden connections among these fields which should be really far from each other.
Long story short: Obsidian pushed me to take a big step from a note taking madness to build a second brain.
Thank you Obsidian, thank you Community!

[santi]

Santi Younger

From Paper Zettelkasten To Obsidian

There I was, once again looking for a new app to organize my ideas. I’d been through all the common apps, nothing worked.

I found out that a mad sociologist by the name of Luhmann managed to write over 70 books with the help of over 90,000 pieces of paper in drawers. He called his system Zettelkasten.

My journey began, I created my own paper index card system.

It was great, but it quickly got out of hand, I knew I needed to find a digital version of it.

I found plain text files, I decided to go hard core. I hear of this thing called vim, months later the world was mine.

From the moment I felt the benefits of my new system. I wanted to share what I’d learned.

I needed to find a user-friendly yet powerful tool that allowed me to teach these techniques.

Now, I finally knew what I was looking for:

• Powerful [[connections]]
• Plain text local files
• Markdown
• Vim shortcuts
• Awesome Community

The rest is history.

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This story was shortened, here’s the full blog-post

[Silver]

Thanks for all the submissions, guys!

We’re closing this and moving on to voting phase soon. Will let everyone know when voting starts!