Linking for Navigation is where you include forward and back links in your notes such that it makes it easy to navigate your notes collection and pull up all the related notes. This is in contrast to Linking for Visualization, which involves being very deliberate in how you link information, such that a graph of your notes can illustrate the structure. Often times if you link for navigation it creates [[Network Diagram Hairballs]].
I’m not sure at the moment if there is a good solution to the problem. I’d love to be able to create different types of links in my notes. Have structure links and navigation links. One way to do this might be to use the tag system and network graph for visualizing structure.
Side Note: It is interesting to think about how actually the brain is built for navigation linking and the retrieval of information. Consider that each of the 10^11 (one hundred billion) neurons has on average 7,000 synaptic connections to other neurons.
I believe one way of linking for visualization without hairballs is to use views with few nodes each.
Your nodes can appear in many views.
You can define several views that share nodes and arcs.
Example: The world’s map view (many countries) and the continent’s map view (few countries). You rename a country in the tool, and it renames it in both the map view and the continent view
Ideally, we’d be able to use link types to distinguish between links of different nature. That way, we could clearly specify that a particular link points to the next / previous note in a note sequence. For example, like this:
Part of the problem with learning and knowledge work is knowing that you made an error or are doing something wrong because the field and tasks aren’t clearly defined or understood. This also leads to a lot of somewhat vague forum posting, where people feel as if they aren’t doing knowledge work correctly, but have no clue how to fix the problem.
Getting started with my Zettelkasten workflow and trying to wrap my head around everything. Would you recommend formatting your Daily note with the Zettlelkasten date/time format?
The purpose of the zettelkasten date/time format is primarily because it can serve as a unique identifier. Each second of time is unique and not repeated, which keeps you from every worrying about creating duplicate filenames.
For my zettelkasten, I use titles because it allows for a smoother workflow. The one exception I’d make is for a daily note. Because daily notes are centered around a specific time (day is a unit of time, as is week, month, year, etc) it makes sense to use date/time format.
I haven’t worked out my thoughts completely on the Note Sequencer feature of the Zettelkaasten^3 software and whether I’d like to have that as an option within Obsidian.
Option 1: have a giant notes outline. The problem with this is that it becomes increasingly hard to navigate and use as the list grows in complexity. My current implementation involves just spinning off sections to new outlines but this becomes cumbersome. The zettelkasten^3 solution is much better, whereby it keeps the scope of the outline to what is listed under the current note you have selected.
The one plugin that I know that is a step towards doing this is the Outliner plugin. But I haven’t played around with it yet, so do not know how feasible or desirable it is for me.
Option 2: is to create a series of nested embeds. This is difficult because you run into issues if you accidently do a recursive embed.
Relational Notes (e.g. structure notes, outlines, etc) help you analyze and breakdown a topic into its parts. This is important because it helps orient you toward understanding by showing you how the ideas are connected and work.
Story Notes are ones that tell a story, such as a chapter in a book. The point of having them is that they help orient you towards creating.
(P.S. this is from a paper note I wrote and waited to long to process, so I’m not 100% sure what I was getting at with the story note or where the idea came from. I’m sure at some random point in the next few days I’ll suddenly remember what I was getting at with creating this note).
273 - Why do we love to classifying and create a taxonomy of note types?
People love to come up with different “note types” such as: fleeting notes, literature notes, seedling notes, evergreen notes, etc… There are a million of them. I believe people are doing this because attaching a metaphor to the note helps them understand and remember the purpose of a note they are creating.
In the context of Bloom’s Taxonomy Revised we are classifying and comparing “note types” in order to come to a better understanding of notes and how we can engage with them in different ways to achieve different results.
Classifying Notes by To Dos
One form of classification is about tracking the different stages of development a note can go through. An idea we have can
start off as just a phrase “note types”
which can then become a title for a note with the idea expanded upon underneath
which can then transform into a network of notes
which can then be added to an outline for a book
which can then be turned into a whole book on knowledge work or various note types
Doing so allows us to know which notes we want to work on further for them to become as useful as they can be to us
Classifying Notes by Purpose
Another way we classifying notes is by attaching a purpose of them. Calling a note “structure note” reminds us that the purpose of this note is to help us understand the relationship between a group of notes.
The above titled “story notes” reminds us the purpose of the note is to tell a story, which is important way that people communicate with each other.
This would probably be considered a Layer of Structure in ones zettelkasten.
Does further specialization caused by the mapping of knowledge lead to false complexity? For example the debate going on about how many dimensions of personality are there or how many different intelligences exist (many or one?). The parsing of knowledge only goes so far as the utility to get from it. For example I can make up a bunch a different types of knowledge. For example, put random words in front of knowledge (e.g. salad knowledge), such that they have no real meaning and no utility. Could this be applied to how we use “Note Types”?
In some versions of the Zettelkasten that distinction is called Structure-notes vs Content-notes.
I guess what you call Relational Notes (such as Outline-notes, Index-notes, Meta-notes, Lists-notes, Portal-notes, etc) are «Structure-notes».
And what you call Story Notes (such as Reference-notes, Literature-notes, Permanent-notes, Article-notes, etc.) are called «Content-notes».
Maybe there are many ways of calling the same concept but that is how I learned the Zettelkasten at least
I haven’t played around with Juggl plugin that much yet but I would love the capability to better sculpt the graph view. Where I can click on notes and have them be temporarily ignored. Then I can click on notes and have them expanded by auto-populating all the connected notes. So by adding and removing notes on the graph, you are sculpting an understanding of a topic. Finally I would like to be able to save the graph to be referenced in the future. What made me think of this was project “Wikipedia Map”, I like how it allows you to explore connections in wikipedia.
Totally agree! I suspect that graph view could be an important tool but I realized that actually I don’t use it much and the reasons, basically, are the “issues” you’re pointing out being “navigating through clic” I think it’s the feature I miss more
