I have a friend who does research and we are exploring uses of Obsidian for research.
Let’s start out with 20 researched papers, all entered into Obsidian as text, marked up. Not in Endnote or Zotero but the full text in Obsidian.
Next: 15 themes, all who have separate notes. For example, one such theme could be “regulation of social media”.
All the themes are connected to different papers, both to papers in general and parts of papers.
And this of course generates a map - the graph view.
And finally, here’s my plugin idea:
QUALITATIVE CONNECTIONS
I would love to see a plugin where I can rate the connections (manually) and make me able to visualise them better than the graph does now.
- Give a connection between two notes a value, for example between 1 and 100.
The plugin should have an option for what happens when the number increases. Thickness of line is an obvious candidate (1 - normal line, 100 = 10 point line). Color another (1 - black line, 50 = green line, 100 = red line).
- Give the connection a name
For example “similar findings”, “same university”, “contradicts” etc.
I’m not sure if plugins can do things with the graph view, but that’s our idea.
I’ve made a mockup in Omnigraffle as an rough example. With lots more papers it would prove the concept better, but I wanted to air the idea quickly.
What do you think? Useful? Possible?
