Tag: note-taking
6 items with this tag.
What the Quartz graph view reveals about this site
The graph view is one of the reasons I built this site with Quartz, and now that there's enough writing on it the links between pages have started to form a shape. The graph opens from the top bar, shows the site's writing as a network coloured by type, and lets you choose what's on it. This post shows how to read it, and what it reveals about the site: where the ideas cluster, which concepts hold the rest together, and which ones nothing connects to.
Obsidian
Obsidian is a note-taking application that keeps every note as a plain markdown file in an ordinary folder on your own computer, and lets you link notes to one another. Because the notes are just files, they outlast the application, and any AI agent that can read files can read them without an export or a special connection.
YAML
YAML is a human-readable format for storing structured data as plain text. In knowledge management and publishing workflows, it appears most commonly as the frontmatter block at the top of markdown files, where it holds metadata — title, author, date, tags — that tools can read without parsing the document itself.
Building an AI-ready knowledge base
A detailed account of a week-long project to restructure 5,819 Obsidian notes using AI as a working partner. The project involved building a 23-category taxonomy, migrating thousands of legacy notes to a consistent metadata structure, and generating AI-written descriptions for every note in the collection. The piece describes not just what was done, but how extended planning conversations, external project documentation, and careful human review at each phase made the work tractable. The most unexpected outcome was that building infrastructure for a note collection required articulating, for the first time, precisely how I think about my academic field.
How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
Source details Matuschak, A., & Nielsen, M. (2019). How can we develop transformative tools for thought? numinous.productions/ttft .
Organising your notes for AI: why retrieval isn't enough
Most advice on organising notes for AI treats it as a retrieval problem, as if the AI only needs to find the right documents. The harder problem is translation, making the relationships in your thinking machine-readable without losing what makes them yours. This post explains why search and retrieval fall short, shows what a typed link between two notes looks like, and suggests one small way to start.