Obsidian Notes

"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

All of us take notes - for school, for life, we need to record things so we can remember them and make sense of them. In this course, I am hoping to teach you a specific way of taking/making notes that will give you the tools for academic and intellectual success.

If you want to know more about the how to take smart notes, I recommend you take a look at the work of Sönke Ahrens, who wrote a concise and readable guide, How to take smart notes. His website contains the kernel of his ideas, which I will also communicate to you through our assignments and exercises. You can also read more about the method from sections of the book posted on the class Obsidian folder.

Ahrens' method is not medium dependent - you can do it using paper cards or many different kinds of software, but we (and now Ahrens himself) think Obsidian is the best tool to use. We are making notes using Obsidian because it has the potential to be future-proof, it allows a considerable improvement over the paper version of note-taking (e.g. its ability to easily link to other notes and incorporate digital media seamlessly), it is free and it has the potential to assist your learning for the entirety of your degree (e.g. its functionality expands as your expertise develops).

At the end of term, students may wish to submit their entire Obsidian vault (i.e. folder of work) as part of their end-of-term submission.

What kind of smartnotes do I write?

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.)

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).