Thanks for your feedback; I’m glad my post was helpful. Some of the early approaches to a digital zettelkasten had highlights in one note, then you’d create a separate literature note for each big idea. I thought it would be easier to type in the literature notes directly above the highlights on the same page, then add a back-link heading (a one-sentence summary of the note) that you could organise in your index. So, let’s say you read an article and highlighted some good points. You would create a note for this in Obsidian called something like [[H - How to take smart notes (or whatever the text is titled)]]. You would have your metadata at the top (author, date, link, full publication in APA), followed by all the highlights. The highlights would follow this structure:
[[E - One-sentence summary of idea)
L: The note rewritten in your own words with your own insights.
- H: The highlight from the original source
So the L note goes above the H note but below the E title. Then, you would slot the E titles into your index as contextually relevant, and then click it to create it as a standalone evergreen note.
In the evergreen note, I’d include the author’s surname and the date in brackets as a top level heading (e.g., # Ahrens, 2018) followed by the L note I wrote in my own words in the original highlight note. Following that I’d have a # Connections header, under which I could link to other related evergreen notes and tabs. Having them as headings meant I could link to the L note only elsewhere in the vault.
Using transclusion and the linking to headers feature, you can modify the E titles in the index to be something like: [[E - one-sentence summary of idea#Ahrens, 2018]], then looking in the preview mode you can see the L note transcluded in the index and the name of the author.
Over time, I found that transforming the notes into my own words was taking a long time and creating a backlog of notes to process, so I’m now not transforming notes until later on. When I went to use the transformed notes in my own publications, I invariably reworked them anyway, so now I’m following the same process as above but not bothering with L notes. Also, following some reflection on Nick Milo’s blog post on progressive summarisation, I now think of connections earlier in the process. The current approach is:
- Read and highlight sources (in Zotero) then create Highlight notes in Obsidian
- Add one-sentence summaries above each idea (keeping the ideas in the original author’s words)
- Think of connections for each idea and add tabs and short notes instead of the old L notes
- Organise E summaries into the index
- Create evergreen notes by clicking the E summary in your index, adding in the surname and date of the author, the note from in the author’s words, connections and reference. (I actually call these Atomic notes now instead of evergreen notes because evergreen notes are defined differently to what I have, which is still the author’s original work but split up into atomic ideas)
- Create paper outlines drawing on the E titles and transcluded atomic notes in the index and transform into your own words from there.
Not sure if this is interesting or useful so I’ll leave it there but happy to have further discussion on any aspect of my process. Seems to be working in that there’s no backlog of notes to be processed and I can spend more time reading and publishing.
Take care!