The HN comments too echo this certain sentiment about the practice of notetaking, how it’s not necessarily about the notetaking itself, but rather making some type of notetaking a regular habit. Any other thoughts, feedback?
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That is an extremely interesting article! Thanks! I’ll comment more later if I have the time after digesting it.
The author says it turns out not to be so useful to use bi-directional links, and knowing where to put things is a big problem.
I’ve never found mono-directional links to be that useful. Tagging is useful, but it does take a few seconds when you’re categorizing material. But I think it’s time well spent. There may be a certain amount of mental drudgery that will always be with us until the bots get smart enough to file things for us.
David Allen’s advice is to put everything in one place. When it comes to electronic solutions, the problem is (1) Space, and (2) Security.
Security can be provided by encryption, but encryption comes at a performance price in the world of TW. So I only put things that need encryption (contacts, DRM material, passwords, bookmarks) into the encrypted file.
I put things that don’t need encryption into other categorized notebooks. I would like everything to go into two notebooks, encrypted and not encrypted, but that isn’t possible because of space limits in TW. What would really help is faster, more efficient ways of saving images, and links to external documents in other formats (particularly PDF).
In TW there is also the question of historical preservation. I feel that markdown will be with us for at least another 25 years. Given that TW has already had one major text change, I don’t know that I can trust it. I still have untranslated TWC tiddlers!
So I’ve started saving articles in markdown format. For articles, I find I only need the text, links, and simple (italic, bold) formatting. Everything else is dross. When you save articles with these basic parts, they take up much less space than original source materials.
I’ve also considered that it might be better to commit bulk saving (e.g. articles) to a well-funded project like Zotero.
The upshot is, you may need to save your information in a few different places, and you may need to do some appropriate tagging and appropriate allocation when you start. But it pays off when you’re looking for information. Bi-directional linking doesn’t magically fix these problems, it was just a back-door way of categorizing.
Right. If the aim is to preserve yourself long-term, yes, undoubtedly a multi-pronged approach is the only biscuit worth biting. TT
Erm. Isn’t HTML rather good too?
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HTML from most sources is really, really bloated. Just about impossible to edit by hand. Increases the article size easily by at 3 times.
And if you’re just taking your own notes, really awkward to use without a WYSIWYG editor.
Which one invented the wrench?
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Talking TW for a moment. I actually find that HTML generated from WikiText is VERY clean. You yourself have done stuff to help that. I’m talking Output For Posterity Broheim, not the swamp of normal HTML. In my experience HTML output from TW is very clean. Just saying. TT
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I wanted to get back to the article and make lounge comments.
I want to emphasise, first, computing is not really my field. I look at the issue more like an ethnographer/linguist: how do we cross-connect meaning relevantly?
Two quick points …
1 - The Roam thing is not new. To me it’s deja-vu. 20 years ago it was a hot topic in the field of “TextBases”. These were about using inter-linking to get beyond “DataBases”. This mainly happened in the social sciences. The field basically disappeared; absorbed by the Google glut.
2 - I think TW’s basic architecture is fundamentally “agnostic”, open & supportive of any cross-link strategy wanted. The only thing we lack is some kind of synoptic overview of how to activate any strategy you want. Maybe in time that will come?
Just comments, TT
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I actually found the article left wanting. Personally I think it said more about the writer than the tool he was criticising. Not withstanding he was criticising a “For Purpose tool” and I think he did not have that purpose in mind.
tiddlywiki is of course more than perhaps he could cope with,
With great power, there comes great responsibility and ownership
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I think at the end of the day, lots of people are looking for something that will do their thinking for them. That day will arrive, alas, about 2 minutes before the apocalypse.
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