The art of note-taking

Interdisciplinary works involve understanding the distinctive flavours of different fields of science. For instance, how do sociologists talk about groups? What are the different takes of max Weber and Georg Simmel on how we should think about groups? How do they differ from cultural evolutionists talking about groups? Or organizational scientists?

I developed a note-taking system to keep track and internalize all these ideas using three (fundamental) technologies; Github, Obsidian, and Anki. Github let me share my (local) notes across devices (I don’t like clouds) and keep track of how my notes are evolving. Obsidian is pretty on the eyes, has a great community and great search bar, and let me link my ideas. Anki let me remember it all. Each of them integrating nicely with each other; I can write Anki notes in Obsidian using AnkiConnect, or by push Obsidian vault to Github.

If Obsidian is my hardware of choice for note taking, Evergreen notes is the software by which I mostly internalize notes and concepts (augmented with Anki for easier remembering).

Finally, my note-taking system is integrated in other parts of my computational workflow, such as visualizing my literature reviews (e.g. this entry) and my blog. Since Obsidian is just a collection of markdown files, which are easily templated, I format my notes in such a way that I can automatize data extraction.

There is much more to be said, this is only the beginning.