I arrived to Obsidian a couple of weeks ago and it looks like I finally found what I was looking for.
While importing and developping my library of thoughts, a question came up. So I wanted to see if maybe someone here came across the same question and developped a good method/practice that I could learn from.
Here is the context:
I use my collection of notes for personal thoughts extracted from journals, as well as for ideas and topics I work on professionally (artistic/academic) and to feed my passion for philosophy. The sources of ideas and thoughts are, as you can see, very diverse - and I just love how they start to connect even more since I started using Obsidian.
The problem is, I often develop thoughts and ideas without knowing in which context they will be used at later points. Which means that I need to keep track of where the thoughts came from even after many levels of association and development. Let’s say for example, I come from a literature note, which combines with a journal note and creates a new insight. Right now, it’s relevant to me just because I love insight per se. At a later point, after many more steps of associating, it might be relevant again in an academic context. I guess it would be important to be able to trace back the whole line of thought, back to all the “parent notes” that combined into that insight.
Until now, I have used a footer part of my notes that always contain the source of the thought. This is always a link - either to a literature note, to a journal entry or to an original permanent note. In case of synthesis notes, where I combine two or more notes together, both or all of the parent notes will be shown there.
Now let’s say, I create a new note deriving from a synthesis note, a new literature note and yet another journal entry because the combination sparked new insight. I will put as sources the three notes mentioned above, but it will still contain thoughts from the parent sources of those notes. This could become relevant at some point - be it to trace back my thoughts and deepen them, research more about the context, for academic correctedness or legitimation or any other reasons.
If anyone of you has a good system in place for doing so, I’ll be happy to read your inputs!
Have a look at the Breadcrumbs Plugin (the Parent-Child Hierarchy could be a starting point and you can add other hierarchies to custom fit your needs).
Thank you very much for your answers!
I am looking into both plugins to figure out which one best fits my needs.
One more question: can either plugin (or both) show several “generations” up and down? So not only parents but great-great-grandparents as well? And can either plugin (or both) deal with, say, 3 parents to a note and their respective “genealogy”?
I do the same, except I put the links on top. In your description, it seems to work in helping you trace back your thoughts. What is the problem you are looking a solution for? Or what would you like to improve?
After a few years these are my rules. I have gone from more elaborate setups to actually super simple. I struggled a lot with navigation, linking and finding back content.
no folders, this only lead to categorization stress (is it a journal entry or Todo item or note for a project? Who cares!)
no tags, instead i only use notes (searching for a tag = viewing backlinks of a note). I like the UI better (a note in the centre of the screen instead of a bunch of Search results on the side), it allows me to write down notes and comments about the tag (MOC)
first line contains links and sources.
time-sensitive notes sich as todos, journalling, blogs, meetings, etc are named “yymmdd title.md” and are called articles. They are generally only written once.
evergreen notes such as bookmarks, book summaries, maps of content, “tags”, topics and knowledge are named “title.md”. They are updated with new insights. I call them “Topics”
Topics are like tags, but because they are notes they really help navigation. You can use dataview to render a list of the backlinks i believe (i have a custom web component that I use both in obsidian as wel as markmarijnissen.com). The top line of any note often contains the relevant topics and sources.
I also learned that i must make effort to organize notes (and in particular topics!), Otherwise i only dump thoughts in, but they become hard to navigate as they lack links to relevant topics.
Also, instead of having both folders, tags and links to navigate, i simplified it all to topics. Like folders, there can be a hierarchy. Like tags, there can be multiple. It has everything you need without locking you into a fixed (folder) hierarchy!
Yes Breadcrumbs trail view will give you that. I have some note sequences that involve multiple “generations” even further back than your "great-great-grandparents.
Here is a sample from the wiki I linked to previously: