Logistics of an Open Access Notebook.

Obsidian Properties, Micro-blogging and Research Transparency.

I have a lot on my plate: numerous research projects, teaching and TA responsibilities at two universities, a dissertation to finish, not to mention the logistics of moving from one province to another. I spent much of today thinking through and reorganizing notes in my Obsidian vault for the open-access notebook (OAN). You may be asking: What is an OAN?

Simply put, it is a digital collection of all my research notes inspired by Caleb McDaniel’s Open Notebook History. The main difference between Dr. McDaniel’s ONH and my OAN is the digital platform's interface and UX (user experience). As you may know, RogueHistory Notes runs via Obsidian Publish, fetching all my notes (stored in markdown language, md.) and publishing them online. Easy-peasy.

The logistics of creating this OAN are daunting. Why? Well, it’s a main deliverable for my dissertation, and creating a cohesive, intuitive, and navigatable OAN for academics and the public to access has many moving parts. One way I can keep my mind focused on particular tasks is to micro-blog while working. Social Network reference, anyone?

I am considering setting up an independent micro-blog page for everything related to the evolution of the OAN and Obsidian. The objective is to provide a pseudo-live public account of the project and give brief insights into the approaches, processes, and failures I encountered on this journey. One of the dissertation’s central tenets is Generous Thinking (Fitzpatrick 2019), combined with Failing Gloriously (Graham 2019); the project showcases the nitty gritty evolution of scholarship, at least my research, as it transforms into a final product and give you access and the ability to interact with my research notes. A second objective is to get me to write more. Two posts in one week. Not a bad start.

Properties/metadata in my Obsidian vault.

Writing more does not necessarily mean blogging more. Instead, it is intended to get me back into a writing schedule so I can get this f@k’n dissertation done. Today, I was reorganizing hundreds of notes' properties, i.e., metadata, which spurred the micro-blogging idea. My notes do not say I was reorganizing the data in my Obsidian vault besides an update date in the note properties, which you do not see; an invisible research process. However, these actions led me to rediscover notes I forgot about or never finished, which is a lot of them. Through hours of work, I have made some new connections and thoughts about the project as a whole—for example, maintenance of the sight after the dissertation is done. I digress; micro-blogging will be a to-be continued venture. Back to properties.

These metadata, known as properties, are not accessible via the main public user interface but are for the backend organization of my research. Properties can be anything: A title, note type (zettlenote), status of note (incomplete, in-progress), date when created and date when modified, bibliographic information, priority (high, medium, low), and more. Hash-tags, #Byzantine, used to be part of my properties’ meta-data. However, I have elected to place them in the front matter for several reasons.

Image of notes with tags #Byzantine/Coins.

First, tags provide links and interconnect my notes. Though wiki links [[wiki]] are the primary source for linking notes accessible via the frontmatter in Obsidian, I prefer tags as they tend to provide a more holistic, dare I say, objective approach to linking notes. I still use Wiki links for notes with particular relationships to my research, but tags provide another level of connection and identifier. Moreover, I can create secondary levels of identifiers with tags, i.e., #Byzantine/Coins. Further fine-tuning what notes can be linked.

Second, tags on the frontmatter of a page allow the user to click on a tag, say #Byzantine/Coins, and it will pull up to twenty notes with that tag. I may extend this number so all notes with the tag are visible, but this depends on whether it makes the UI clunky. Tags are the first item at the top of a Note’s page, allowing users to see how I sub-identified the note with its primary title. It allows quick access to linked notes via the tagging process.

This is by no means a refined and finished method for identifying and linking notes. However, this is another step in the academic research process that most of the public does not see. Indeed, even the final scholarly product tends to be inaccessible to the public—all the more reason I need to micro-blog about my processes—something to keep considering.