"Philosophical" question on best practices for historic/biographical atomic notes

Knowledge management
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I’ve been using Obsidian for a few years, but recently started a history PhD so I’ve been rethinking my vault structure.

Specifically, I’ve been struggling with folder structures, as I’ve noticed that I reread books taking copious notes multiple times, then slotting the book note into a different folder and only realizing later.

To prevent that I’ve gotten rid of all (most) folders and put all source notes into a single folder which are named with citekey from Zotero. I’m trying to learn about MOCs, though I’m not sure I’m a big fan of those.

I’ve also just rewatched morganeua’s cool video on Zettelkasten, and atomic notes, specifically the “irreducible” nature of those, and paying attention to writing things in my own words and then linking more.

My question now is how I could best deal with biographies of historic people. Since there are going to be more of those soon, I thought it best to find a solution for those.

Currently they’re in my Atomic Notes folder, but that doesn’t really fit just because of the nature of Atomic Notes and the nature of biographies consisting of more than a single idea.

I realize this is a silly problem to have, I’m just really trying to simplify my vault structure to make things easier on myself when I have a ton more notes.

Currently my vault structure is

Admin (everything that doesn't go in with the actual notes, e.g. meeting notes, calendar stuff, todos, etc.)
MOCs
Ideas ("fleeting" notes)
Atomic notes
Sources

I’m mostly asking for ideas and how other academics, scholars, hobbyists, or anyone deals with this.

Thanks :slight_smile:

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did you generate this answer with AI?

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I keep bios in subfolder in a “Reference” folder. I add descriptive front matter properties to the bio (with a template) as well as the alias: property so that different spellings of a person’s name, or different titles can easily be accommodated when referencing that person in atomic notes, book and article highlights, or elsewhere in the vault.

(Related, though not on topic, I also use the “Strange New Worlds” plugin, which simplifies reviewing the context for linked references.)

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As RoyRogers, I keep my notes of biographies (or other books/articles, etc.) in a Reference folder, where all my observations, notes or quotes are written on the page of the item, with frontmatter and proprieties.

If I understand Atomic Notes correctly, you could make those from the initial biography and be free to have different ideas from them in your Atomic notes folder?

My formula is heavily inspired by 01 Notetaking for Historians - Doing History with Zotero and Obsidian - Obsidian Publish.

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I think atomic notes are less useful for advanced work in the humanities than they are elsewhere. An atomic note encourages you to represent a “fact” like:

Politician X believed idea Y.

But, once you’re doing PhD-level work in history, the real thing you need to record is like:

Scholar Z claimed politician X believed idea Y.

And, for understanding that three years from now when you’re furiously working under a deadline to hand in your thesis, it really doesn’t help to have that “fact” segregated off in its own corner, away from the context that would more easily remind you why scholar Z thought it was important, or what Z’s political biases were, or that Z was notoriously careless in using archival sources and nobody will take you seriously if you cite Z with a straight face.

Personally, my notes on historical or more philosophical topics tend to be more like: this note is everything that scholar Zhang said about politician Xavier in their 2012 biography of Wilson, and I’ll call it something like Xavier (Zhang 2012). Sometimes those notes will be really short — practically atomic. More often they’ll be longer, sometimes much longer.

You can still get most of the benefits that atomic notes offer for linking. Just have Obsidian create one of its gobbledy-gook “block” labels for a paragraph or a bullet point in a longer note, then link to that with a link like [[Xavier (Zhang 2012)^c85df92a2]] — in your MOC, or the outline for a paper you’re going to write, or whatever.

When it comes to organizing folders, do whatever works for you. Personally, I’d feel overwhelmed by a massive folder with a thousand notes sorted alphabetically. I prefer to have a folder for each major person, or group, or theory, or scholar, etc., and file every note about them inside that folder — I’m less likely to completely lose something that way than if I relied solely on good linking habits and the search function. The Scrivener app that I used for years let me write anything I wanted on a “folder” just like it was a “note”, and I’d usually put some rudimentary MOCs there for the person/topic. The Folder Notes plugin lets me do almost the same in Obsidian. (Just don’t let yourself obsess over which folder to use for a note that talks about two people equally. It really doesn’t matter.)

Good luck.

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