5. Collecting Literature Notes
A guide to turning literature notes into an annotated bibliography
In order to complete an annotated bibliography, I am asking students to use Obsidian to link their notes together and embed one note in another. I have created an annotated bibliography template that you can use.
What follows is a slightly artificial way of doing this, that will allow your notes and their internal links to survive after you upload it to our common HGS Shared Vault (which is the end point of the assignment). If you were doing this in your own vault for yourself some steps would be redundant.
Requirements
In advance of the following steps you will need:
to have Obsidian installed and working with the class vault.
to have written literature notes (see exercise 4) for the readings making up your annotated bibliography.
Steps
Download the newly created Annotated Bibliography Template and copy it to your "_simple-templates" folder.
Create a new folder in Obsidian. Call it something like "YourName-Annotated Bibliography". We are going to use this folder as a holding space for the work to be uploaded.
Inside this folder, create a new note. Title it something like, "Your Name - Annotated Bibliography 1.0". Then using templater (<% icon in the left sidebar), add a template to the note for "annotated-bibliography".
Essentially, you will then need to complete all the various sections of the template.
Fill out the properties section (you might only add tags at the very end)
After you have finished reading and annotating your texts, as well as writing up literature notes, you should spend a bit of time reflecting on the trends you noticed in reading or that emerges from your notes. This will form the field overview summary. This section takes the most thought and reflection and is the most helpful for preparing you for your stage 2 project.
Take inspiration from the tags that you develop for each note and see what connects and separates your readings. Do they fall into subgroups? Do they seem distinct but all address a common theme?
When you are annotating your readings, you might want to have very simple tags like, "StronglyAgree" or "TotallyWrong" which (alongside other descriptive tags), you might use this as a quick way to see what key ideas you came across. These strong
After you are done writing your literature notes, you might also want to open up the "graph view" on Obsidian (the icon with two circles above a line, with a circle below) which visualizes the connection between your notes.
The Key Topics are the start of your research steps after the annotated bibliography is done. In this section, make a list of links to other potential notes. So, develop on your main ideas that emerged from your reading and links to your future project. If you are working on the depiction of the past in Genshin Impact, you may have come across the idea of "retrofuturism" or "alternate history" in your readings will underlie your (future) analysis. A Retrofuturism note would be one that you use to first define the idea (copying or embedding the text from the relevant lit notes), but then on to which you also add evidence from your Genshin Impact game journal/ game notes. These idea notes become topical organizing sections for key analysis sections.
In the Key Topics section, you would create links to potential Idea Notes. When you create a link (i.e. any word or series of words between a pair of two square brackets), the link is potential. If you click on the link, the note is created.
If you are producing an idea note (later, not for the annotated bibliography), add the "permanent-note-template" to the note once it is created.
The Works section is the longest section, asking you to properly cite and to link the work you are discussing, providing a summary in your own words and as it relates to your specific project, and also any tags. All these texts will already be completed in your literature notes you have written.
You citation can be in any format as long as its reasonable and consistent. I do find anything other than Chicago style somewhat ugly, but I can get over that. I strongly also feel that MLA is not a real citation style for adults.
Your summary can be as long as you wish, but it should be structured and summative, not rambling.
As is shown in the annotated template, you can simply copy and paste this text from your literature notes or you can embed them.
The Related Links section is meant for you to link to other works, blogs, resources etc. that you think might be useful (or has been useful but doesn't seem scholarly enough for the annotated bibliography). You can annotate these or not as you see fitdepending on what seems useful for you. I'm looking for the minimum of a few links showing your additional research.
So, you've filled out all the sections of the Annotated Bibliography note. Now make copies of all your literature notes and copy them into your Annotated Bibliography folder.
Yay! You're mostly done. Except now you need to upload everything to Teams.
If you have embedded annotations in your literature notes, you will also need to copy your annotation notes into your Annotated Bibliography folder. If you embed text to a note which is no longer in the vault (e.g. you delete the linked file, or you copy a note with embedded text into a new vault), your note will contain instead a message like, "Annotations - Kee 2009 could not be found. Click to create note."
This note simply notifies you that the linked embedded text is no longer recognized by Obsidian.
Embedding text from one note into another
Obsidian is super useful in that it allows you to embed text from one note into another. This means that if you have annotations you want to stick into a literature note, or a summary from a literature note that you want to stick in an annotated bibliography note, you can put text into a new note while maintaining a link back to the original. And then, if you update, add to or modify the original text, it updates in all other notes automatically.
To embed anything into a note you use an "!". So to embed a picture in a note we would use the following syntax:
You can also embed a note entirely in another note (if you wanted, but usually this is inelegant), using "![[Notename]]"
To embed a paragraph in that note, you use a similar syntax, but add a "^" (shift + 6) before the second pair of square brackets. Then Obsidian will open a pop-up window that will allow you to select the paragraph you want, which Obsidian will assign as an alpha-numeric code. So to parse an embedded "summary" from the Kee and Graham literature note in our shared vault, you embed something with the initial !, add two squarebrackets to let Obsidian know you are embedding a note, the ^ tells it you want to embed a paragraph of this note and then the "99bfb3" is the specific reference to a paragraph inside the note you selected to embed.
Uploading your annotated bibliography to Teams.
You can find where your "vault" is stored (as a folder) by clicking the vault icon (a square with a circle in it which opens a door when your cursor hovers over it) in the bottom left corner of the Obsidian window. Your vaults will appear on the left side of a pop up window showing the title and location, like the following. One shows a vault that is on my local storage and another which is synced to the Teams folder (mirrored to local storage via One Drive).
You can't unfortunately drag files from open Vault windows into folder windows (at least not on Macs). So you need to find the files themselves, which will look something like the following. Your notes will have the .md suffix (which is denoting that the file is a "Markdown" file, which is the file format Obsidian uses).
You will need to now drag your Annotated Bibliography folder containing all your notes (or markdown files, if you want to be pedantic) to Teams. In the HGS-Shared Vault, there is a subfolder called "Student Work" with names for each of you. Drag the Annotated Bibliography folder into your named student work folder. And you're done!
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