Indent with Intent: Fundamentals of Roam Research by [[R. J. Nestor]]

for - notetaking software - Obsidian - Roam Research - open source alternative to - Foam

notetaking software - Obsidian - Roam Research - open source alternative to - Foam - Microsoft owns Github and Foam is served from Github

to - Foam - https://hyp.is/Pf6tKnXBEe-rkdcD0hmZGA/foambubble.github.io/foam/

I'd listened to this whole episode sometime since 2022-04-05, but didn't put it in my notes.

Mark Robertson delineates how he actively models the use of his note taking practice (using Roam Research) while teaching/lecturing in the classroom. This sort of modeling can be useful for showing students how academics read, gather, and actively use their knowledge. It does miss the portion about using the knowledge to create papers, articles, books, etc., but the use of this mode of reading and notes within a discussion setting isn't terribly different.

Use of the system for conversation/discussion with the authors of various texts as you read, with your (past) self as you consult your own notes, or your students in classroom lectures/discussion sections is close to creating your own discussion for new audiences (by way of the work your write yourself.)

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1194506/4875515-mark-robertson-history-socratic-dialogue-live-roaming.mp3

Digital Smart Notes Part 4: Creating Permanent Notes In Roam Research<br /> by Harley Stanger

Part 1: https://harleystagner.com/digital-smart-notes-part-1-the-capture-toolkit/ - Part 2: https://harleystagner.com/digital-smart-notes-part-2-exporting-highlights-to-roam-research-with-readwise/ - Part 3: https://harleystagner.com/digital-smart-notes-part-3-creating-literature-notes-in-roam-research/ - Part 4: Digital Smart Notes Part 4: Creating Permanent Notes In Roam Research

synopsis of Ahrens

Wouln't the Hypothesis bookmarklet be preferable and easier to use?

From a discussion on DEVONthink alternatives for Windows users.

https://www.loom.com/share/a05f636661cb41628b9cb7061bd749ae

Synopsis: Maggie Delano looks at some of the affordances supplied by Tana (compared to Roam Research) in terms of providing better block-based user interface for note type creation, search, and filtering.

These sorts of tools and programmable note implementations remind me of Beatrice Webb's idea of scientific note taking or using her note cards like a database to sort and search for data to analyze it and create new results and insight.

It would seem that many of these note taking tools like Roam and Tana are using blocks and sub blocks as a means of defining atomic notes or database-like data in a way in which sub-blocks are linked to or "filed underneath" their parent blocks. In reality it would seem that they're still using a broadly defined index card type system as used in the late 1800s/early 1900s to implement a set up that otherwise would be a traditional database in the Microsoft Excel or MySQL sort of fashion, the major difference being that the user interface is cognitively easier to understand for most people.

These allow people to take a form of structured textual notes to which might be attached other smaller data or meta data chunks that can be easily searched, sorted, and filtered to allow for quicker or easier use.

Ostensibly from a mathematical (or set theoretic and even topological) point of view there should be a variety of one-to-one and onto relationships (some might even extend these to "links") between these sorts of notes and database representations such that one should be able to implement their note taking system in Excel or MySQL and do all of these sorts of things.

Cascading Idea Sheets or Cascading Idea Relationships

One might analogize these sorts of note taking interfaces to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). While there is the perennial question about whether or not CSS is a programming language, if we presume that it is (and it is), then we can apply the same sorts of class, id, and inheritance structures to our notes and their meta data. Thus one could have an incredibly atomic word, phrase, or even number(s) which inherits a set of semantic relationships to those ideas which it sits below. These links and relationships then more clearly define and contextualize them with respect to other similar ideas that may be situated outside of or adjacent to them. Once one has done this then there is a variety of Boolean operations which might be applied to various similar sets and classes of ideas.

If one wanted to go an additional level of abstraction further, then one could apply the ideas of category theory to one's notes to generate new ideas and structures. This may allow using abstractions in one field of academic research to others much further afield.

The user interface then becomes the key differentiator when bringing these ideas to the masses. Developers and designers should be endeavoring to allow the power of complex searches, sorts, and filtering while minimizing the sorts of advanced search queries that an average person would be expected to execute for themselves while also allowing some reasonable flexibility in the sorts of ways that users might (most easily for them) add data and meta data to their ideas.

Jupyter programmable notebooks are of this sort, but do they have the same sort of hierarchical "card" type (or atomic note type) implementation?

Thanks for this! I like the framing and general concept of the book.

It seems like its a good follow on to Dan Allosso's OER text How to Make Notes and Write https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/ or Sönke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes https://amzn.to/3DwJVMz which includes some useful psychology and mental health perspective.

Other similar examples are Umberto Eco's How to Write a Thesis (MIT, 2015) or Gerald Weinberg's The Fieldstone Method https://amzn.to/3DCf6GA These may be some of what we're all missing.

I'm reminded of Mark Robertson's (@calhistorian) discussion of modeling his note taking practice and output in his classroom using Roam Research. https://hyp.is/QuB5NDa0Ee28hUP7ExvFuw/thatsthenorm.com/mark-robertson-history-socratic-dialogue/ Perhaps we need more of this?

Early examples of this sort of note taking can also be seen in the religious studies space with Melanchthon's handbook on commonplaces or Jonathan Edwards' Miscellanies, though missing are the process from notes to writings. https://www.logos.com/grow/jonathan-edwards-organizational-genius/

Other examples of these practices in the wild include @andy_matuschak's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGcs4tyey18 and TheNonPoet's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sdp0jo2Fe4 Though it may be better for students to see this in areas in which they're interested.

Hypothes.is as a potential means of modeling and allowing students to directly "see" this sort of work as it progresses using public/semi-public annotations may be helpful. Then one can separately model re-arranging them and writing a paper. https://web.hypothes.is/

Reply to: https://twitter.com/BenjaminVanDyne/status/1571171086171095042

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEycdHEQrco

See also the author's (Eva Keiffenheim) article on RoamBrain: THE COMPLETE GUIDE FOR BUILDING A ZETTELKASTEN WITH ROAM RESEARCH

https://www.otherlife.co/pkm/

The PKM space has gotten crazy, but mostly through bad practice, lack of history, and hype. There are a few valid points I see mirrored here, but on the whole this piece is broadly off base due to a lack of proper experience, practice and study. I definitely would recommend he take a paid course to fix the issue, but delve more deeply into recommended historical practices.

This useless knowledge graph is one of the worst parts about Roam Research. It is bad UI and wholly unusable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRnfSs6Hu3k

One's note taking is not only a conversation with the text or even the original author, it is also a conversation you're having with your future self. This feature is accelerated when one cross links ideas within their note box with each other and revisits them at regular intervals.

Example of someone who uses Roam Research and talks about the prevalence of using it as a "conversation with your future self."

This is very similar to the same patterns that can be seen in the commonplace book tradition, and even in the blogosphere (Cory Doctorow comes to mind), or IndieWeb which often recommends writing on your own website to document how you did things for your future self.

https://roam.elaptics.co.uk/posts/lfr-letters-from-a-roaman-letter-xxxx

In addition to using his card index for producing his published works, Barthes also used his note taking system for teaching as well. His final course on the topic of the Neutral, which he taught as a seminar at Collège de France, was contained in four bundles consisting of 800 cards which contained everything from notes, summaries, figures, and bibliographic entries.

Given this and the easy portability of index cards, should we instead of recommending notebooks, laptops, or systems like Cornell notes, recommend students take notes directly on their note cards and revise them from there? The physicality of the medium may also have other benefits in terms of touch, smell, use of colors on them, etc. for memory and easy regular use. They could also be used physically for spaced repetition relatively quickly.

Teachers using their index cards of notes physically in class or in discussions has the benefit of modeling the sort of note taking behaviors we might ask of our students. Imagine a classroom that has access to a teacher's public notes (electronic perhaps) which could be searched and cross linked by the students in real-time. This would also allow students to go beyond the immediate topic at hand, but see how that topic may dovetail with the teachers' other research work and interests. This also gives greater meaning to introductory coursework to allow students to see how it underpins other related and advanced intellectual endeavors and invites the student into those spaces as well. This sort of practice could bring to bear the full weight of the literacy space which we center in Western culture, for compare this with the primarily oral interactions that most teachers have with students. It's only in a small subset of suggested or required readings that students can use for leveraging the knowledge of their teachers while all the remainder of the interactions focus on conversation with the instructor and questions that they might put to them. With access to a teacher's card index, they would have so much more as they might also query that separately without making demands of time and attention to their professors. Even if answers aren't immediately forthcoming from the file, then there might at least be bibliographic entries that could be useful.

I recently had the experience of asking a colleague for some basic references about the history and culture of the ancient Near East. Knowing that he had some significant expertise in the space, it would have been easier to query his proverbial card index for the lived experience and references than to bother him with the burden of doing work to pull them up.

What sorts of digital systems could help to center these practices? Hypothes.is quickly comes to mind, though many teachers and even students will prefer to keep their notes private and not public where they're searchable.

Another potential pathway here are systems like FedWiki or anagora.org which provide shared and interlinked note spaces. Have any educators attempted to use these for coursework? The closest I've seen recently are public groups using shared Roam Research or Obsidian-based collections for book clubs.

https://github.com/mathieudutour/gatsby-digital-garden

A set of packages to create a digital garden with Gatsby.

https://roam.elaptics.co.uk/posts/lfr-letters-from-a-roaman-letter-xxxviii

Sönke Ahrens uses block references in Roam Research as zettels (or atomic notes), but puts them into larger pages almost as if he was pre-building larger project pages, as described in his book.

https://every.to/superorganizers/the-fall-of-roam

A user talks about why they've stopped using Roam Research.

I suspect that a lot of people have many of the same issues and to a great extent, it's a result of them not understanding the underlying use cases of the problems they're trying to solve.

This user is focusing on it solving the problem of where one is placing their data in hopes that it will fix all their problems, but without defining the reason why they're using the tool and what problems they hope for it to solve.

Note taking is a much broader idea space than many suppose.

An example of a user who is (no longer) centralizing everything into one place. Also an example of a person overloading their use of note taking tool as a melting pot of data. Do they have a mental map of how to separate the pieces to get the value out of their system?

It seems like they want it to "just work" without any conception of what this looks like

Example of someone who doesn't appreciate the work of note taking.

https://reallifemag.com/rank-and-file/

An interesting example of someone who fell into the trap of thinking that a particular tool or tools would magically make them smarter or help them do a particular line of work without showing any deep evidence of knowing what they were doing. The discussion here flows over a number of mixed note taking domains with no clear thrust for what they were using it pointedly for. The multiple directions and lack of experience likely doomed them to failure here.

https://github.com/adithyabsk/tftbot

A Twitter bot that will tweet out data from your PMK tools. Presumably this is for spaced repetition or a goal towards creating combinatorial creativity.

https://www.goedel.io/p/tft-performance-roam-research

I always thought of the #RoamCult hashtag as a bit tongue-in-cheek, but certainly something with a more positive framing could be chosen.

It's interesting to hear that the project seems to have gone quiet and that the perception is that people are leaving for other projects (many of them open source, which is one of the spaces many of the early adopters were already working in).

There's definitely a drive in a lot of this space for people to own their own data given it's direct value to them over other (more social facing) tools.

https://roam.elaptics.co.uk/posts/lfr-letters-from-a-roaman-letter-XXXIV

The level of complexity to using some of these tools is also a huge hurdle for the everyday user as well. Some require deep knowledge of the tool along with coding ability as well.

Perhaps this complexity barrier will come down over time, but some projects don't seem to be working toward making things easier and simpler for the end user.

This is still too often the case in the general public as evinced by watching the Obsidian and Roam Research spaces.

The tools for thought crowd should all be reading Kalir and Garcia's book Annotation.

Alasdair Ekpenyong's Digital Garden

Alasdair is an academic in the area of library science.

https://roambrain.com/how-my-road-led-to-roam/

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1381953081697562625.html

Sounds like Dave Winer is tinkering around getting Little Outliner to work with Roam or Roam like structures? He certainly might have some useful ideas for Flancian in terms of cobbling together all these note taking / wiki-like platforms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7TO-OkIMtI

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Aaron Davis</span> in 📑 How to remember more of what you read | Read Write Collect (<time class='dt-published'>08/20/2021 12:31:59</time>)</cite></small>

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Aaron Davis</span> in 📑 How to remember more of what you read | Read Write Collect (<time class='dt-published'>08/20/2021 12:31:59</time>)</cite></small>

Is this similar to the mixing of a daily journal page with note taking seen in systems like Roam Research and the way some use Obsidian?

A free email course for Roam Research.

There's apparently a product that will turn one's Roam Research notes into a digital garden.

Great to see a bridge for making these things easier for the masses, but I have to think that there's a better and cheaper way. Perhaps some addition competition in the space will help bring the price down.

https://bzawilski.medium.com/using-zettelkasten-and-obsidian-to-learn-more-effectively-333ac90d001a

Facile overview article that touches on the basics but looses sight of the longer flow of history.

Don't recommend.

https://dev.to/tmhall99/beyond-taking-notes-or-how-i-joined-the-roamcult-22k3

Lots of resources on the topic to start down a rabbit hole, but no clear outline or thesis of what is going on or why it's useful. At best a list of potentially useful links for getting started.

Revisiting this essay to review it in the framing of digital gardens.

In a "gardens and streams" version of this metaphor, the stream is flow and the garden is stock.

This also fits into a knowledge capture, growth, and innovation framing. The stream are small atomic ideas flowing by which may create new atomic ideas. These then need to be collected (in a garden) where they can be nurtured and grow into new things.

Clippings of these new growth can be placed back into the stream to move on to other gardeners. Clever gardeners will also occasionally browse through the gardens of others to see bigger picture versions of how their gardens might become.

Proper commonplacing is about both stock and flow. The unwritten rule is that one needs to link together ideas and expand them in places either within the commonplace or external to it: essays, papers, articles, books, or other larger structures which then become stock for others.

While some creators appear to be about all stock in the modern era, it's just not true. They're consuming streams (flow) from other (perhaps richer) sources (like articles, books, television rather than social media) and building up their own stock in more private (or at least not public) places. Then they release that article, book, film, television show which becomes content stream for others.

While we can choose to create public streams, but spending our time in other less information dense steams is less useful. Better is to keep a reasonably curated stream to see which other gardens to go visit.

Currently is the online media space we have structures like microblogs and blogs (and most social media in general) which are reasonably good at creating streams (flow) and blogs, static sites, and wikis which are good for creating gardens (stock).

What we're missing is a structure with the appropriate and attendant UI that can help us create both a garden and a stream simultaneously. It would be nice to have a wiki with a steam-like feed out for the smaller attendant ideas, but still allow the evolutionary building of bigger structures, which could also be placed into the stream at occasional times.

I can imagine something like a MediaWiki with UI for placing small note-like ideas into other streams like Twitter, but which supports Webmention so that ideas that come back from Twitter or other consumers of one's stream can be placed into one's garden. Perhaps in a Zettelkasten like way, one could collect atomic notes into their wiki and then transclude those ideas into larger paragraphs and essays within the same wiki on other pages which might then become articles, books, videos, audio, etc.

Obsidian, Roam Research do a somewhat reasonable job on the private side and have some facility for collecting data, but have no UI for sharing out into streams.

An interesting tool for taking notes from Jeremy Ho. Designed with Roam Research in mind.

The Eloquent tool is available to install! Capture ideas in-context with:<br>• On-page highlighting<br>• Nested bullets<br>• /snippets<br>• [[braces]] and #tag syntax<br>Quick capture is a hotkey away. Bonus hotkey sends your highlights/links to @RoamResearch pic.twitter.com/vLLbPX4zwW

— Jeremy Ho (@jeremyqho) July 21, 2020

I wish it could save data as a local text or markdown file so it would also be easier to use with Obsidian or other note taking tools. It's similar in nature to the Roam Highlighter extension.

Details at https://www.notion.so/Eloquent-Resource-Center-72f95c2a71d34c5181e4907edf7a96e1

Some conventions may be emerging in a new batch of personal knowledge management tools, or amenable to them; for the duration of this document, we'll refer to these tools as [[personal knowledge management]] tools, [[roam like]] or (preferred as of the time of writing) [[wiki like]].

It would be incredibly useful to have a list of these [[Roam Research like]] tools so that they can be documented as to what level of input they can/could take and remain compatible from text, to text+[[wiki links]], to the various flavors of markdown up to full HTML perhaps.

I know a handful are documented at indieweb.org/commonplace_book

This word is exactly the point. What if this web page were a public thing within Roam? Then other people's notebooks could comment within their own, but using notifications (via Webmention) could be placed into a comments section at the bottom of one's page or even done inline on the portions they're commenting on using block references.

Notice the difference in user interface and onboarding between [[Notion]] and [[Roam Research]].

But why can't it do both?

Because it's on the same platform, they could allow people to make their notes public and shareable. They could add Webmention support so that one notebook could talk to another!

C'mon people!!? Don't you remember the dream of the Memex?

This is the first reference I've heard about [[Athens]], but there are many others that aren't mentioned here including Obsidian, Foam, TiddlyWiki, etc. which have been adding the backlinking capabilities.

They don't unless you're building a wiki or commonplace book that can interact with those of others. (Roam research isn't doing this---yet, but they should.) Ideally small building block pieces will allow it to dovetail with other systems that could potentially do the same thing.

Getting data into any of these note taking tools quickly always seems to be the most difficult part of the process.

The design of this, which predates that of the wiki, also seems eerily familiar as a digital version of a zettelkasten or the design which seems to underlie Roam Research's product.

emacs is pretty much an operating system. This makes it infinitely configurable and hard for new comers to grok.