3. Starting with Obsidian

We will be practicing how to take SmartNotes and use the Obsidian software together. It is possible to read Ahrens' book Smartnotes and implement this process in an entirely analog fashion (with cards in box, for example), but we are trying to show you how digital tools can make the research process easier.

Overview

"It is much easier to get started if the next step is as feasible as “writing a note,” “collect what is interesting in this paper” or “turning this series of notes into a paragraph” than if we decide to spend the next days with a vague and ill-defined task like “keep working on that overdue paper.”

Sönke Ahrens, How to smart notes, chp. 13, sect. 5

In this class, we will practice reading academic works and creating effective and useful notes from them. Building up your own smart note system requires that students work up foundational building blocks (references to works read) and notes that build off of them (literature and permanent notes). For history, texts form the foundational building blocks of our ideas - reading written history and then recording our thoughts on evidence (no matter if evidence takes the form of texts, images, material culture etc.)

In an Obsidian vault posted on Teams, I've created templates for writing up these notes. I'll create instructions on how to do this in the next exercise. We'll first focus on getting the starter vault downloaded and installed on your device.

Transitory Notes

Often when we have an idea, we try to jot it down somewhere and then hope we find it again later. But often we don't ... we just lose the note and then lose the idea we had!

The smart notes process asks people to get things into a note when you have a good thought, and then come back to it later. To have lots of random notes that you process and make sense of. They key to the smart note process is to have ideas, record them and then make sense of them, by adding them to your vault. Eventually, they get incorporated into idea notes or you discard them.

Reference Notes

You make reference notes, because I want students to practice writing up a proper citation for works we are reading. Proper citation is in part about 1) showing you can follow scholarly norms, in part because 2) sloppy citations make you look unprofessional and 3) (most importantly!) future-you will thank past-you if properly done references are a click away and you can easily track down an origin to your ideas.

Literature Notes

You write literature notes to show how you have thought about the reading. Literature-notes (and importing thoughts/annotations from hypothes.is) allow you to have a record of passages you found most helpful/ interesting and record why you thought so. This means that these passages (quotations w/annotations) are then available when you want to come back to that topic - in this class or in others (believe me, historians come back to ideas like, "What is history" over and over again...).

Permanent Notes

You write permanent or idea notes to gather together similar thoughts on a central topic. You might want to have a note on "what is a game", which gets added to as you read more about history games. Idea notes (aka permanent notes) are meant to exist as nodes for your thinking and start to show intellectual collisions or agreements by different authors. These sorts of notes are very useful in establishing historiographical trends in scholarship (and the geneaology of ideas).

Getting Obsidian Set Up

The description of Obsidian in the syllabus portion of this site lays out how to install the software. These instructions assume that you have already done so.

In order to get people started with Obsidian I have designed a starter vault for us to use with some files and folders already there and plugins pre-installed. Here I will walk you through the process of getting the starter vault working. Importantly, all the readings for term are located in the "Readings folder".

The starter vault is located on our Teams and can be downloaded two ways. You can click on this link (you need to be signed in with your Carleton credentials) or via Teams you can download it to your device.

Click on the download option after clicking on the ellipsis (i.e. the "...")

The "HGS - 2024 - Shared Vault" should save wherever your downloads normally save. Remember where that is. Now, open Obsidian. It should looks something like this (although if you are using Obsidian for the first time, the sidebar will be empty). You will click on "Open folder as vault".

You should click on "Open folder as a vault", which will then open up a window to allow you to locate the file in your device's memory.

Click "Open" (or equivalent on your device). Obsidian will ask you whether you trust the author of the vault. Choose: Press "Trust Author and enable Plugins". If you fail to click this, delete the folder from Obsidian and start again.

It is super important to click "Trust Author and Enable Plugins"! It ensures that you don't have to manually configure the underlying software.

Your folder will open to this Settings window. Click on "Check for Updates" for the current plugins. Then close the settings window.

Then your folder should be revealed and look something like this:

Yay! You've done it! Now onto the next step.