https://new.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/1efd8he/are_there_any_working_academics_on_here/

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/1avz21q/what_to_teach_in_an_obsidian_workshop_at/

https://lifelonglearn.substack.com/p/my-student-kates-obsidian-demo

Reply to Couscous at https://discord.com/channels/686053708261228577/722584061087842365/1197392837952684052

A quick survey of currently active academics, teachers, and researchers who are blogging about note taking practices and zettelkasten-based methods.

Individuals

Dan Allosso is a history professor at Bemidji State University who has used Obsidian in his courses in the past. He frequently writes about related topics on his Substack channels. One can also find related videos about reading, writing, and research process as well as zettelkasten on his YouTube channel. In addition to this, Dan has a book on note taking and writing which focuses on using a card index or zettelkasten centric process.

Shawn Graham has both a blog as well as a prior course on the history of the internet using Obsidian. In the course materials he has compiled significant details and suggestions for setting up an Obsidian vault for students interested in using the tool.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick has a significant blog which covers a variety of topics centered around her work and research. Her current course Peculiar Genres of Academic Writing (2024) focuses on writing, note taking (including Zettelkasten) and encourages students to try out Obsidian, which she's been using herself. A syllabus for an earlier version of the course includes some big name bloggers in academia whose sites might serve as examples of academic writing in the public. The syllabus also includes a section on being an academic blogger and creating platform as a public intellectual.

Morganeua is a Ph.D. candidate who has a fairly popular YouTube channel on note taking within the academic setting (broadly using Obsidian, though she does touch on other tools from time to time).

Chris Aldrich is independent research who does work at the intersection of intellectual history and note taking methods and practices. He's got an active website along with a large collection of note taking, zettelkasten, commonplace books, and sense-making related articles. His practice is a hybrid one using both analog and digital methods including Obsidian and Hypothes.is.

Bob Doto is a teacher and independent researcher who focuses on Luhmann-artig zettelkasten practice and writing. He uses Obsidian and also operates a private Discord server focused on general Zettelkasten practice.

Manfred Kuehn, a professor of philosophy at Boston University, had an influential blog on note taking practices and culture from 2007 to 2018 on Blogspot. While he's taken the site down, the majority of his work there can be found on the Internet Archive.

Andy Matuschak is an independent researcher who is working at the intersection of learning, knowledge management, reading and related topics. He's got a Patreon, YouTube Channel and a public wiki.

Broader community-based efforts

Here are some tool-specific as well as tool-agnostic web-based fora, chat rooms, etc. which are focused on academic-related note taking and will have a variety of people to follow and interact with.

Obsidian runs a large and diverse Discord server. In addition to many others, they have channels for #Academia and #Academic-tools as well as #Knowledge-management and #zettelkasten.

Tinderbox hosts regular meetups (see their forum for details on upcoming events and how to join). While their events are often product-focused (ways to use it, Q&A, etc.), frequently they've got invited speakers who talk about their work, processes, and methods of working. Past recorded sessions can be found on YouTube. While this is tool-specific, much of what is discussed in their meetups can broadly be applied to any tool set. Because Tinderbox has been around since the early 00s and heavily focused on academic use, the majority of participants in the community are highly tech literate academics whose age skews to the over 40 set.

A variety of Zettelkasten practitioners including several current and retired academicians using a variety of platforms can be found at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/.

Boris Mann and others held Tools for Thought meetups which had been regularly held through 2023. They may have some interesting archived material for perusal on both theory, practice, and a wide variety of tools.

Others?

I've tried to quickly tip out my own zettelkasten on this topic with a focus on larger repositories of active publicly available web-based material. Surely there is a much wider variety of people and resources not listed here, but it should be a reasonable primer for beginners. Feel free to reply with additional suggestions and resources of which you may be aware.

This is great. I'll put it into my collection along with Shawn Graham who has some prior work for teaching with Obsidian (https://shawngraham.github.io/hist1900/#the-big-idea) as does u/danallosso who has also used it quite bit for both classes as well as Open Education Resources. If you search for Dan's YouTube & Substack, you're likely to find some of his writing/resources there.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/13khuxs/obsidian_for_teachers/

see also: https://github.com/biscotty666/OBSPKMEssentials

1. Zettelkasten for INTERMEDIATE users of Obsidian

Buttons for coprolites and oosik... 🤣

His templates look a lot like some of the work and templates I use to import annotations/notes from Hypothes.is into Obsidian.

I just finished my Bachelor thesis working with Obsidian! by u/ThiIsAnkou

100 literature- and about 650 permanentnotes. Thanks to Obsidian and Zettelkasten!

Regina Martínez Ponciano aka u/NomadMimi in r/ObsidianMD - PhD workflow: Obsidian, Zettelkasten, Zotero, Pandoc, and more at 2021-03-15 (accessed:: 2023-02-24 10:10:11)

Broadly similar to my own workflow though I use Hypothes.is for fleeting notes rather than Zotero.

Original copy at: https://martinezponciano.es/2021/04/05/research-workflow-as-a-phd-student-in-the-humanities/

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/jc25p4/going_from_obsidian_notes_to_a_finished_piece_of/

Nothing remarkable here other than a reference for someone who uses Zettlr for writing

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/t3buj2/what_are_the_best_themestemplates_for_the_purpose/

Nothing really useful here.

reply to u/rl4215 at https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/10jhlr2/using_obsidian_in_academia_a_demotutorial_vault/

This is an awesome start.

Some additional resources I often recommend for folks: Obsidian has a discord with a chat room specific to #academia where folks can ask questions. https://discord.com/channels/686053708261228577/@home

Historian and professor u/DanAllosso has some great YouTube Videos on Obsidian with respect to both his own work as well as discussion on using it to teach: https://www.youtube.com/@MakingHistory2022/search?query=obsidian Because he's into Open Educational Resources, he's naturally got a great book on note taking and writing: https://boffosocko.com/2022/08/02/how-to-make-notes-and-write-a-handbook-by-dan-allosso-and-s-f-allosso/. His YouTube channel has a series of videos in which he reads the entire book making it an audio book of sorts as well. If you dig around you'll see that he's got a book club with a shared Obsidian vault that multiple can contribute to in a wiki-like manner.

Kathleen Fitzgerald, Director of Digital Humanities has a fairly significant Obsidian practice and has some fun material on task tracking: https://kfitz.info/tasks-matter/. It looks like you've got a good start on some of this in the example vault already.

Archaeologist Shawn Graham has a class he's teaching with Obsidian that has some great resources some may appreciate: https://mastodon.social/@electricarchaeo@scholar.social/109509678170907504. See also: https://shawngraham.github.io/hist1900/

I haven't run into anyone in the Library Carpentries space with Obsidian resources, but I suspect they'll show up sooner or later.

We definitely need more of these resources to share and learn from collectively.

Thanks again!

https://github.com/rlaker/Obsidian-for-Academia/issues/1

Perhaps I can circle back around to add in more of the specifics, both for the documentation and so people better understand what's going on and how things are dovetailed. Until then, the following two articles about setting up and using Obsidian with Zotero are fairly useful templates/walk throughs: - https://www.marianamontes.me/post/obsidian-and-zotero/ - https://nataliekraneiss.com/your-academic-reading-list-in-obsidian/