Introduction
Hello, my name is Andrew Weymouth and I have worked with the University of Idaho Library as the Digital Initiatives Librarian in the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning (CDIL) department since the fall of 2023. My work generally consists of creating and maintaining our digital collections, working with CDIL fellowship recipients, helping to rethink processes and introducing new digital scholarship tools to the department.
Why?
This work was prompted by my pursuing master’s in History with the University of Idaho in the fall of 2024 while also working as a faculty member with the library. I wanted to think about creating a note taking system that could visualize connections across many different books that would be beneficial for creating historiographies specifically, but would also be helpful while creating literature reviews, scientific reviews and environmental scans.
Note: Everything that I will be talking about today is completely open source or available to you at no cost as a University of Idaho student or staff member.
Obsidian was founded in 2020 as a markdown file based knowledge management tool that has a very active user base and regularly updates systems based on that feedback. Obsidian supports the use of multiple computer languages, including JavaScript, HTML and CSS but, as we will see later, you can do as much or as little of this kind of thing on the pages depending on your experience with / interest in these technical approaches.
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Most of the tagging we will be focusing on for this presentation involves memorizing two or three characters to use Obsidian’s most powerful tools, the visualization or Graph View, which is a very helpful guide to understanding the similarities and differences across a diverse collection of reading material.