Setting up Obsidian

Obsidian is a note-taking system built for connecting ideas. Notes are in plain text, formatted in Markdown for high portability, and the software adds backlinks and graphs to show the relationships among them. Zotero is a reference manager. Its browser plug-in lets me grab material from the web, perhaps a web page or a PDF, along with its metadata.

I can highlight a passage in a paper stored in Zotero and export the highlight with citation details into an Obsidian note. Alternatively, I can use Obsidian's own browser plug-in to import some or all of a web page directly into Obsidian, again as a note with metadata from the web page.

Obsidian is deceptively simple to use, but to realise its potential you must structure and organise it to suit the way you think. Easier said than done. Some research brought me to Zettelkasten, a note-taking method where each idea is a single note linked to other notes holding related ideas. This creates a network to support deeper thinking and discovery. After some trial and error to understand the concept better, I went in search of a practitioner whose way of thinking was similar to mine. This turned out to be a YouTuber called Callum (aka Wanderloots).

Callum's channel has over fifteen videos relating his personal experience in building a second brain, and offering advice about all aspects of Obsidian for that purpose. I satisfied myself that Callum's approach would be a good basis from which to develop my own, but didn't have the time to watch every video in order to learn from their content. I needed a quick and efficient way to fast-track that process. Step forward NotebookLM.

One of the great things about NotebookLM is that you can give it fifteen YouTube videos and then have a conversation about their content. The discussion can encompass the content of one, several, or all of the videos. To help you structure the conversation, NotebookLM can produce a mind map setting out all the concepts or ideas contained in the videos. On top of that, to help you reflect on these ideas while strolling round the park after work, the AI can produce an audio overview. This takes the form of a podcast-style discussion between two hosts, and you can set the ground rules for their discussion, for example the focus points, audience, technical level. Listen in for yourself.

Intriguingly, the discussion is interactive when you're online to the AI. You can join in to ask questions or steer the discussion in a particular direction.

Through conversation with NotebookLM, I mapped out Callum's approach and adapted it into an architecture for my Obsidian setup. At its core is the concept of synthesising ideas through different types of note, creating these as you think about the ideas:

atoms represent single, distinct ideas or concepts;
molecules connect atomic ideas, identifying insights or new connections;
alloys thread together molecules to create a coherent narrative for publication, e.g. as an article or blog post.

It seems to make sense, but I am in the early stages of seeing how well it works for me. So far, I like it.