Academic notetaking with Obsidian

Duration: 3.5 hours

Effective note-taking is an important skill for any scientist, as it allows you to keep track of the tasks you need to complete, key learnings from papers you’ve read, the design of your research, and any new ideas that come up while you’re working. There are many different ways to take notes, including using pen and paper, post-its, digital documents, and even printed out papers with notes written on them. This often results in scattered notes on different media that are difficult to extend, connect, search or archive. Having all of your different notes in one place allows you to keep your thoughts organized and interconnected and helps you to always find your notes again and to streamline your workflow.

The goal of this interactive workshop is to explore the various methods of note-taking, discuss what we require good notes to look like and introduce a powerful tool called Obsidian. Obsidian is a markdown-based note-taking tool that can help modelers stay organized and on track with their work. It provides an easy-to-use interface for creating and organizing notes, as well as a system for linking notes with each other to create a web of interconnected thoughts and ideas. Obsidian is very flexible and can be customized and optimized for your specific workflow and thought process. This flexibility and adaptability make it a valuable tool for any modeler looking to improve their note-taking and stay organized.

To get started, I will provide a Demo-Notebook for academic note-taking with a lot of useful functionality (e.g. daily notes, literature notes connected to Zotero, organizing to-dos and projects) on Github.

Number of participants: I offer the workshop for maximal 30 persons to enable a good atmosphere for discussion and support for the hands-on part.