4. Reference/Literature Notes

Ready for use.

Overview

The goal behind Obsidian is to contain all the information for a project in one place - notes, drafts, evidence. In Ahrens' Smartnotes system, we are meant to track what we read, how we thinking about the readings and how this develops new ideas. He sees notetaking as an engine to develop new ideas and thoughts. He treats reference notes and literature notes as two different things (one is like an index card with a single reference on it; and a literature note is a series of cards that arise from it).

For our purposes, I suggest that we treat reference notes and literature notes as the same and add a bibliographic reference as simple text. In more advanced uses of Obsidian you can import references as single entries in a larger database and so sometime it can make sense to have a stand-alone reference note for a work, but at this stage we will ignore this potentiality.

Before you start:

1. For this exercise, you will need to have completed exercises 3 and 3b, getting Obsidian installed and imported the class Obsidian vault.

2. And in order to complete this assignment, you will need to have annotated the readings for this week with Hypothes.is, Obsidian Annotator or Zotero (for this assignment it doesn't matter which you used).

• If you have used Zotero you will have to manually copy your annotations from Zotero. Select your annotations note (if you have created one) and copy it wholesale into an annotations note.

Create a literature note

I am laying out the instructions for a single literature note, but you should write up a literature note for each of the readings for this week.

Open up Obsidian and create a new note. This can be done simply by using the key stroke "control+n" (Windows) or "⌘+n" for a Mac. Or navigate to the top left corner and click on the pen and paper icon.

It's the icon on the top left.

If you do either of these options, a new note with the name "untitled" will appear in your main folder. You likely will want to put it into the literature folder (you can drag and drop it). Or avoid this step by right-clicking on the Literature folder and selecting "New note" which will create a new note in the folder.

You now need to insert a template. Select the templater icon "<%" on the left sidebar and select "literature note template". It will autopopulate your note with instructions for the note.

Now, fill in the properties:

• add a title (usually author - title - date of publication; or a variation that makes sense to you and your citation style). Add a title both for the note and in the properties section.

• Add a project (it could be class, "Historical Game Studies")

• Add the date

• And add any tags - type in key words that emerged from your reading or also take keywords the publisher might already have posted for the work. To add tags, you type in a word and then hit the "return" key. You might want to come back to this section again at then end of doing a literature note, with additional tags.

Your goal is then to complete the note with a bibliographic citation, add a summary of the work/ your thoughts on it, copy in your annotations and then make a list of links which are related.

1. Bibliographic citation.

   1. You can copy and paste the citation of the work from the list of readings (for this week, here), though I am a bit fast and loose with how I cite. If you're generating a larger bibliography in the future (as you will be) you may wish to establish a firm standard for yourself in advance.

   2. If you are using Zotero, you can also right-click on an entry for the work you're writing a literature note about and "Create bibliography" (and select the "copy to clipboard" option). Copy your citation into the 'Work Title" section.

1. Write up a summary of the work.

   1. You might want to come back and complete this at the end of the process, but if you've already read through and annotated the work, you likely have a clear sense of what its usefulness is.

   2. This summary should be written to highlight the key ideas you took away from the work and how you might find it useful in the future. If you are working towards a proposal, for example, you should highlight in this summary how it might help that future project. If you are interrogating a specific question for a larger project, you should note how the work connects to it and is useful (or not). Be explicit about relevance (e.g. "The title makes it seem like an overview of topic X but the book is actually a narrow case study of subtopic Y." Or, "When author X uses the word "game", they actually mean "card game, so the book falls short of covering X, Y and Z").

2. Add your annotations.

   1. If you are using Zotero, I recommend that you open up your annotations note for the work and simply copy and paste everything into the obsidian note. It should copy with most formatting preserved.

1. If you are using Annotator or Hypothesis, you can access your annotations document more directly.

   1. You can copy and paste your annotations from a hypothes.is import or an Annotator note. This is the simpler way and for this exercise do this, because I want you to copy your notes for me (more on this below).

   2. You can also embed your existing annotations into your literature note by typing a link with the following code: ![[Annotations - Chapman - 2016]] where the name between the square brackets in the name of your annotation note. Essentially, you add a "![[" in the annotations section, and Obsidian will autocomplete the linkage to an existing note in your Obsidian vault. Do not use this method for this exercise, however.

2. Finally add "Related Links" at the bottom. These are links to other notes in your vault - the other literature notes from this week, or it might be notes that you start writing as a result of your research. You can link to anything in your vault by putting two square brackets around the name of it.

Next Steps

You've now created a literature note! Now do the same for the rest of this week's readings (so a total of four literature notes in total).

When you've created them all, upload them to the Shared Vault on Teams. In the HGS - 2024 - Shared Vault on Teams (which you downloaded to install in Obsidian), there is a folder "Student Work" and in that folder there are folders with the name of each of the students in class. You can navigate to your folder via the Teams interface or follow this link to the same folder via Microsoft Sharepoint (which Teams is really interacting with behind the scenes). In order to copy the files, you can't just drag-an-drop from Obsidian, but will need to find the actual files on your device and upload them. You can search your storage for the file name (which should have a ".md" suffix to denote that it is a markdown file".