How I Use Obsidian as a Grad Student | Note-Taking, Organization & Workflow

hello and welcome or welcome back to my channel if you're new here hi I'm Sarah I'm a fourth year PhD candidate and today I wanted to bring you a video all about the knowledge management system

and notetaking software obsidian so I made a video a little while ago like a couple years ago about note taking for students with ADHD and various methods

that you could use for that and I touched on how I use the software obsidian for my note taking and organization and not only taking individual notes but

also making various connections between them and identifying patterns within my knowledge and since then I've had a few different questions from people asking me things like how to set up obsidian

how to get started with it what kind of templates to use for it and more about how I structure my own obsidian and my

own kind of workflow with it as a grad student and a grad student with ADHD specific specifically so this video is going to be a bit of a follow-up on that first video and I'll address some of your questions about how I use obsidian

and I'll specifically take you through some of my workflow as to how I'm using it as a grad student working on my dissertation my PhD is in religious studies and I'm primarily using

ethnographic methods for my primary research but I also have degrees in other areas of the social sciences and Humanities specifically englishit and

digital Humanities and also anthropology so I have a broad kind of range of knowledge and a broad range of interests

I consider myself to be a very interdisciplinary researcher and I find that obsidian has been especially helpful for finding and building connections across disciplinary

boundaries also as someone with ADHD I find that obsidian can be very helpful for organizing and making sense of my thoughts that otherwise might seem kind

of chaotic and all over the place and I find that people with ADHD were often very good at identifying and seeing patterns in things that

neurotypical people or others may not necessarily see or connections that others might not necessarily make and I find that obsidian is really great for nurturing and expressing that so with

that let's get into how you can start using obsidian if you're just starting out with obsidian it may seem a little bit daunting at first you might be wondering how you're going to get from

this blank empty Vault to these vast interconnected networks of knowledge that you might have seen there is a little bit of a learning curve with obsidian and it does take some time to

develop your network and to create these connections but I think that it's really worth it for me Obsidian has really become my second brain it's important to keep in mind that your obsidian will

grow with you as you develop and as you input more knowledge also know that there is no one correct way to set up an obsidian Vault for academic research or anything else I would really encourage

you to explore what other people have done with obsidian and I'll leave some helpful videos below to see what might work best for you so I'm just showing

you how I created my obsidian Vault for my own PhD work so let's get started with setting up some folders that will house all of your notes and basically organize all of

your knowledge so to add a folder you'll just click the new folder icon up here and you can also create subfolder or folders within folders I have a few main folders here

like dissertation fieldwork papers and presentations and readings so if I go into my graph view you can see that I've assigned each of these main folders a different color and in the graph the

little nodes Within These folders the notes within each folder shows up as this different color the majority of my nodes or my notes are from my readings folder but I can also see that I have a

lot of green nodes forming over here which is notes from my fieldwork folder this is where I'm keeping all of my fieldwork notes so things like interview transcriptions notes on participant

observation and so on then I also have this folder where I keep my papers and presentations and abstracts and things like that including ones that I've written in the past and ones that I'm currently working on then here in my

dissertation folder this is where I keep things like reports proposals and then thoughts and ideas for my dissertation which I will discuss more later when I was first in the process of creating my

obsidian I started by adding notes to my readings folder so if I look in this folder I can see that I have subfolders for all of these different areas of study and different disciplines and I

have sub subfolders for when I need to kind of organize things even further I keep my notes on all sorts of readings that I've done in here including for past degrees past courses papers that

I've written and of course readings for my disertation the notes are all labeled with the citation for the reading and then I'll have the full bibliographical reference here as

well so let's create a new reading note here I've recently been reading a lot about solar Punk for my dissertation so I'll just use a reading that I've been doing on that and when I start a new

note for a reading I'll start with that bibliographic information and I used to fill this out at hand but now I've recently started using the reference

manager zoto which makes things so much easier so I'll just copy and paste the entry from there there are also some ways to integrate zoto into obsidian

more kind of seamlessly and easily and I've played around with some of these methods and I do like some of them but I won't really get into that here it's probably a subject for another video

next I'm going to set up the layout for taking my note using what's called callouts in obsidian which are these colored boxes that you can use in your note to make certain information really

stand out so to insert call outs you'll likely want to go into settings and then set up a hot key shortcut for them and you can make that whatever is good for

you there are a variety of different call outs that you can use an obsidian and you can find a full list of these online and I'll also leave a link with a reference to that below but the defa

call out when you use that hotkey is just note and you can change this to assign it different colors and symbols

the colors and symbols will change though depending on what obsidian theme you're using and I usually use the theme prism because I really like the way that

looks personally so you can use different call outs like abstract info example things like that but you can then name your call out box whatever you

want to I just have a page set up in my obsidian like workflow file where I have the call outs that I typically use already in there so I can just copy and paste all of this into a new note

whenever I'm creating it and it's all just kind of there laid out for me so the way that I organize my notes is by first having the abstract at the top and then key points and then connections and

then I have the space where I actually take those notes then throughout the note I'll have call out blocks for questions so I use this block to leave questions for myself like if something

the author has said has prompted a question for me to think about with regards to my dissertation if it's prompted a question for me for something to investigate explore further if

there's like a concept or a theory or something that I don't understand I'll leave a note here for myself to look into that further or follow up on this then at the bottom I have this part

where I put my own thoughts about the reading so if I take some issue with the author's points maybe or if I think that it might be specifically relevant for a

particular part of my dissertation uh or like a paper I'm writing I'll put those thoughts here so I don't usually put my own thoughts throughout the the actual

reading note because I don't want to get my own thoughts confused with the author's thoughts so I'll I'll just use these kind of specific call out blocks so that I can clearly make that

distinction as I'm taking my notes too or sometimes at the end I'll go through and highlight the especially important part and I use different highlighter colors for different themes that are key

to my research and I keep a document here just to remind me of the color coding system that I'm using I know that other people will use different highlighter colors to distinguish like different elements of a text like for

example to indicate the author's thesis main arguments their examples or discussion section or whatever but for the research that I do within the social sciences and Humanities and ethnographic

research I think that highlighting themes is a lot more important especially as I'm working on like organizing and writing my dissertation so once you have a few different notes

done and made you can start making connections between them and this is where I think obsidian really shines where I think it's really excellent for note taking and organizing is in making

these connections when I'm taking my notes if the author of the text that I'm taking notes on references something that I've already read and already have a previous note for I'll make a

connection to that note so here for example the author has made a reference to a text by Donna harway that is important and it's something that I'd already read so I'll create a link there

to that note and in order to create these links between different notes you'll use double square brackets and then put in the name of the note that

you want it to connect to there and this process of of hyperlinking basically is what connects these notes to other notes within that mindmap graph if the reading

that I'm taking these notes on makes a reference to something that I haven't read yet but something that I think might be important for me I will make a new note for it so usually when I do

this I'll just put in the bibliographic reference for the note and I won't really fill in any of the other stuff yet because I don't want to break out of that note-taking workflow that I'm

likely to be in to kind of jump to a different reference and start working on that so I'll just make this new note won't fill it in right away and it'll just be there as a reminder of something

that I need to come back to later and something that I need to look into more then I also put important Connections in the connections call out box up at the

top of my note so here I'll include important references within the text but I'll also make my own connections to other notes to other readings if it's reminded me of another text or something

or if I think that the author makes an interesting Counterpoint or an argument that goes against another reading that I've done or anything like that any kind of connection that I find I'm going to

put that here in this connections call box when I'm taking notes or looking back on them and I want to be able to actually visualize the connections I can do so by

using the local graph view here which allows me to see all of the connections to that one particular note then from there I can toggle between these interconnected notes which can help me

see what kind of other connections there might be or that might arise making these links between different readings is an important part of my note-taking

process but I also don't just make connections between readings I also use obsidian to help me make connections to the primary field research I'm doing for

my dissertation and essentially also as a way to outline my dissertation so if I go back into the dissertation folder and I go into this subfolder thoughts and

ideas this is where I keep the initial thoughts that I have about my research I have these subfolders organized by different themes that are merging as I'm

doing This research and Within These folders I have various notes that are also themselves sub themes or important points of discussion for me basically there's some of the overarching ideas

that I've been engaging with and thinking about as I've been doing this research they're really where I'm thinking through and brainstorming my dissertation so I won't show you most of these notes because I don't want to risk

the anonymity of any of my research participants and also because this is like very early stages of my dissertation and I don't really want to show that yet

but I can create a new note here to give you an idea of my brainstorming and workflow so I'll make a note for solar Punk because this is something that I've been looking into a lot lately and maybe

I'll start the note by providing a definition of what solar Punk is drawing on some of the reference notes that I have using the split view is helpful here as I can read my notes on one side

and then do my brainstorming on the other side solar Punk is a lot of things so it's difficult to summarize it in a note here but generally I want to say that it's a genre of fiction an

aesthetic but most importantly it's a real vision for the future that some individuals and communities are working towards making a reality it's an optimistic view of the future where Total Environmental degradation and

civilizational collapse is not seen as inevitable and that climate change is something we can address through creative and communal means though this will require radical system change the

movement at its core is anti capitalist anticolonial and largely Ecentric rather than just human Centric and while it's a vision for the future it's also about

enacting this transformation in the present solar Punk really started as an online movement and so the way online communities have defined it and imagined it is really important to the definition

so I'll include some of that here then because some of the communities that I'm researching for my dissertation exemplify these solar Punk qualities I'll look at my field notes for instances where this topic or related

elements has come up either in participant observation or interviews I'll include blurs from these field notes or interview transcriptions and I'll link those notes and then I will

brainstorm and I'll reflect on these bits and consider how I want to bring this into my dissertation and what kind of ideas or arguments seem to be emerging here since my dissertation also

includes virtual ethnography specifically looking at social media I'll likely also link some notes that I've taken on particular social media posts that relate to this then I'll go look at different readings on the topic

and I'll pull some notes from that and again I'll think about how this is significant for my dissertation I also tend to do a lot of my brainstorming and reflecting by hand using just pen and

paper so I'll transcribe those notes and bring them in here too and then I'll just continue making those links between primary and secondary research I like to keep these like brainstorming note files

pretty limited to one particular topic so so if it starts expanding into another related but potentially separate idea I'll create a new note for it and then link it here and this is basically

starting to outline my dissertation this is where it's really taking shape I may do another video about taking and organizing field notes at some point in the future if that's of interest to

anyone it's just really difficult to show here because again I really want to retain that anonymity of everyone that I'm working with all of these different kind of functions of obsidian I just

find really help for my research and writing workflow like I said before though there are plenty of other ways of setting up your obsidian not just this

way this is just the way that I've done it someone recently told me about how they're organizing all of their notes by having like an overarching note for each

major theme that's relevant to their dissertation and then they'll list all of the different reading notes that fall under this theme within that note so

that they're all connected to that main Central node other people use obsidian as more of a zal Casen which is its own Knowledge Management System where

instead of having these individual notes for different readings each note is a particular idea and you're kind of making connections between these different ideas as this train of thought

and they're all kind of connecting to an overarching topic that then connects to other topics which is just a different way of using this system the zidal

casting method has been said to really improve memory recall and also may be especially good for studying and retaining important information and I feel like it might be especially helpful

for people with ADHD because it's really just a way of managing and returning to knowledge and information in a way that it just makes a lot of sense and I don't

personally use this method for note organization but I could see myself using it I just didn't really set up my my obsidian in that way but maybe it's something that I'll think about doing in

the future if you're interested though a YouTuber called Morgan makes excellent videos on using obsidian in this way so I would definitely recommend checking out her videos which I'll link some of

below and that is pretty much all that I have for you today so thank you so so much for watching I really appreciate it and I hope that this video was helpful if you have any questions at all please do let me know in the comments below and

I will try to answer them as best that I can also if you have any tips or tricks or suggestions for using obsidian it would be fantastic if you could leave those in the comments below as well I'd love to hear them and I'm sure that

others could definitely benefit from your suggestions too thank you so much and bye for now