Obsidian and Pedagogy

A word Salad

With the completion of the Xlab Confab and Book Sprint, I thought it would be nice to unwind a bit by writing a post. This is another word salad post, so coherence after three days of Un-Conference, workshops, and a Book Sprint will be tested. The un-conference, for those not in the know, is essentially an extension of the in-between coffee break of talks/lectures at a traditional conference, except that we extend the coffee break for the duration of the conference. The objective is to allow the participants to direct and steer the flow of the talks/lectures/workshops in any direction they please. The un-conference is meant to allow ideas to come into being more organically and promote cross-disciplinary discourse. We set the underlying theme as Cultural Heritage Informatics for our unconference, producing some fruitful topics.

First, our lead workshop and keynote address combined topics in archeo-digital-archival heritage informatics and was presented by Dr. Ethan Watrall, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology of Michigan State University. This was followed by Xlab Graduate student workshops, with day 2 being the Unconference and day 3 being the book sprint. Student-led workshops produced topics ranging from 3D image construction and visualization, photogrammetry, AI and Large Language Models, digital exhibitions with Omeka, Computer vision and manuscripts, and Personal Knowledge Management and Obsidian.md, by yours truly. It sounded like all the workshops went well. However, I was only partially happy with mine.

What I have learned about teaching Obsidian in two workshops, an entire semester class, and providing examples in multiple brief talks is that it is not an easy application to discuss in limited time allocations. The learning curve can be very steep and daunting for the uninitiated. First, Markdown (MD) language: What the hell is it? Though it is a simple text format that has existed since 2004, not many people know about it, and when they do see it, I can feel the impending dread which oozes from their minds. MD can appear as a programming language (which is one functional use for MD), which they must learn in order to use Obsidian. Noted. Second, note taking vs note making. WTF is he talking about? Third, how does one adapt this new-to-them software into their current workflow? Extremely daunting. Fourth, plugins, plugins, plugins, and more plugins. Wait...more plugins. Wait...Updated plugins. Fifth, wiki links and tags -- I have to link shit? Not really, but you will. That's the point.

Teaching Obsidian has been fruitful as it has forced me to consider the numerous skill levels and digital literacies in the student eco-sphere. I try to relate them by discussing my personal story with Obsidian, how I was a digital noob when I was introduced to the program, and how I had never heard of MD language myself before Obsidian. I've never created a Wiki link and only recently joined Twitter (2021). No matter how noob you are, Obsidian can be learned, but it is a steep curve. You can easily be sucked into the vortex of code, discord channels, plugins (did I mention plugins before), and endless and frustrating philosophical debates about Obsidian's underlying utility, purpose, setup and whether you should only maintain one vault or have many.

Two years into using this software, and I am still a relative noob. I am definitely a noob at teaching it, as I get distracted easily by the pretty and shiny fun stuff in Obsidian. However, pedagogical theory and how to approach Obsidian for academic purposes is obscure -- if you do not count the vast number of YouTube videos as pedagogical resources, which I do not. At this moment, I know of only From "Info-glut" to Connected Notes: Obsidian and Digital Note-Taking in Academia, a talk by Dr. Andy Roddick, and Notetaking for Historians - Doing History with Zotero and Obsidian, with the latter more of a discussion on workflows and historical uses for Obsidian rather than pedagogical approaches. Many YouTube tutorials relay the same themes and structures and "look at my setup" without any real theoretical consideration as to why they created the vault the way they did in order to develop their Personal Knowledge Management or PKM. I was the same at first...well, kinda. Some of the central figures in the Obsidian YouTube Universe have theoretical and methodological applications for Obsidian, but these are heavily reliant on concepts of Atomic Notes and Zettlekaten. Thus, these ephemeral dialogues constrain the individual user to existing analog methods adapted for the digital. This is not to disparage or downplay the significance of these contributions to the Obsidian community (the community was another theme that was pulled from the Xlab Confab: What exactly is a community? Who is included and excluded by internal and external participants of said community? Topics for another day), but as an aspiring academic, one who should be writing a proposal, we can do better by inserting Obsidian into scholarly discourse. Consideration must be paid to the moral and ethical issues that the software faces from its proprietary side of the business. Yes, it is a business/company and is not entirely open-source or freely accessible. Academically speaking, we must consider how we apply identifiers to properties (metadata) and label notes in Obsidian. What are our implicit biases, what are their effects, and how does this affect the outcomes of PKM and scholarly research? These are some themes I aim to address in my dissertation as I attempt to use Obsidian as a database manager for Byzantine coins.

Even the label Byzantine is problematic, as readers of this blog know and know how I feel about the term. Yet, here I am using it. Should I replace these identifiers in my vault with Roman or Eastern Roman? How do these labels, in particular, affect my note-making and the connections I apply to said notes via Wiki links and tags? Will this skew my analysis of coins and affect how I can sift through my data? Regarding the workshops, how does one both teach the technical components of Obsidian while maintaining the academic rigour and intellectual integrity that must co-exist with a semi-open-source platform by its very nature is meant to, as Morpheus would say, "Free your mind" and make connections that you may not have seen before. So much to consider for a 45-minute workshop. To conclude this word salad, I think I need to consider contributing to the Programming Historian lessons and possibly begin some critical engagement with my ramblings.