Obsidian, my new best friend!

[kareina]

 This weekend Reengarda had its annual meeting, and I became the “Kassör”, or Exchequer as we normally say in the SCA, or treasurer as other clubs and organisations call the job. We had discussed already at last year’s meeting that I would do this, and that Þórólfr would train me under the course of the year.

 

That training happened on Friday, when I brought my computer over, and he showed me the book keeping program he uses, Gnucash, which, fortunately, works much like Quicken does, so there will be no problems for me to use it. But that is not what I am hear to tell you about.

 

While we sat and discussed finances, he also showed me Obsidian, the program he uses for notes, to do lists, and other things. He described it as an open source version of OneNote. Not having ever used OneNote, my first reaction was “meh”, but then he showed me something amazing--the program has a built-in visualization tool for showing the connections between your “notes”. The same sort of dots and connecting lines images that one sees in archaeology papers on early trading networks.

 

Needless to say, this got my attention! Since it is open source, and free (if you don’t want to pay for their sync service to be able to open the same notes on all your devices without the bother of using dropbox or similar), I dowloaded it straight away. My first thought was that it would be fun to download and import a decade worth of journal entries and their tags to see which tags got used when. I haven’t gotten to that, yet (though it sounds like a fun project).

 

However, yesterday during work I was hit with an inspiration. This would be perfect for our project at build a summary of all of the Open Learning Resources in the field of Research Data Management! So I downloaded the program to the work computer (yay, open access, and no need to request it through IT!) and opened the spreadsheet in which I had been tracking the information, and set to work. I needed to stop and look up information on how to do stuff several times, and once even ignored my prejudiceras against, and even watched a youtube video on how one uses “properties” in Obsidian. It is perfect! I am making a “note” for each resource, with a title, and properties for things like: Institution, country, language, target audience, format of the course, etc., plus “tags” for the various topics covered in the classes. The Visualization tool shows each note, with lines connecting them to the various tags, so one can see at a glance which courses have what topics in common, and one can colour-code the nodes (courses, in this case) based on any of the properties (like say English vs Swedish, or perhaps “all researchers” vs “life science” vs “physics” etc).

 

I have a lot more work to do with this document before I will have all 40+ resources (we already know about) entered in, but I am already loving how it is coming together (and the part where one can grab any node and tug, and the whole graph moves to show the connections to just that node more clearly.

 

I have already recommended it to one of the researchers with whom I am working, who is doing interviews and transcriptions, and summaries of the interviews. By keeping these, each type in its own folder, with links between the connected documents, and “properties” for each showing the date of the interview, the name, their research institution, etc. he will not only be able to do nice graphics showing which topics are shared by all the interview subjects, but he will have his metadata and list of data ready to publish, even if he can’t have the data itself open access for GDPR reasons--it will still be “as open as possible, as closed as necessary”.