(2020-08-29) Aldrich A Note Taking Problem And A Proposed Solution

Chris Aldrich: A note taking problem and a proposed solution. tl;dr It’s too painful to quickly get frequent notes into note taking and related platforms. Hypothes.is has an open API and a great UI that can be leveraged to simplify note taking processes

for my memory-related research and work in combination with my commonplace book for the last year, I’ve been alternately using TiddlyWiki (with TiddlyBlink) and WordPress.

I’ve also dabbled significantly enough with related systems like Roam Research, Obsidian.

Many of these, particularly those that can be used alternately as commonplace books and zettelkasten appeal to me greatly when they include the idea of backlinks.

The final remaining problem I’ve found with almost all of these platforms is being able to quickly and easily get data into them so that I can work with or manipulate it

Older note taking services like Evernote and OneNote come with browser bookmarklets or mobile share functionality

Sadly neither of these services has the backlinking

My WordPress solutions are pretty well set since that workflow is entirely web-based and because WordPress has both bookmarklet and Micropub support. There I’m primarily using a variety of (RSS) feeds.

I’m finding that the user interface piece that I’m missing for almost all of these note taking tools is raw data collection.

Even copying and pasting data from a web browser into my digital notebook is a painful and annoying process, especially when you’re reading and collecting/curating as many notes as I tend to. I’d rather be able to highlight, type some thoughts and have it appear in my notebook. (See my Instapaper use.)

Different modalities for content consumption and note taking

Lectures: I’m typically able to type them directly into my notebook

Physical books (printed book)

While I love a physical book 10x more than the next 100 people, I’ve been trying to stay away from them because I find that though they’re easy to highlight, underline, and annotate the margins, it takes too much time and effort (generally useless for memory purposes for me) to transfer these notes into a digital notebook setting

A potential solution for most of these modalities

For several years now, I’ve been enamored of the online Hypothes.is annotation tool.

simple, beautiful, and fast process for bookmarking, highlighting, and annotating online texts on desktop and mobile. It works exceptionally well for both web pages and when reading .pdf texts within a browser window.

there are only a handful of different spaces where I’m typically making notes.

It’s the note taking tool I wished I’d always had

A large portion of my reading these days is done in online settings

Some texts I want to read (often books and journal articles) only live in .pdf form. While reading them in an app-specific setting has previously been my preference, I’ve taken to reading them from within browsers

If it’s not online or in .pdf format, I’m usually reading books within a Kindle or other e-reading device

The one problem I have with it is that while it’s great for collecting and aggregating my note data into my Hypothes.is account, there’s not much I can do with it once it’s there.

Hypothes.is is open source and has a reasonable API. This portends some exciting things! This means that any of these wiki, zettelkasten, note taking, or spaced repetition services could leverage the UI for collecting data and pipe it into their interfaces for direct use.

small pieces, loosely joined can provide some awesome opportunities for knowledge workers, students, researchers, and others