Folio: How Notetaking Becomes Knowledge
Folio: How Notetaking Becomes Knowledge
An introduction to a comprehensive system for notetaking in Obsidian.
The Goal for Folio
People have used notetaking for centuries to accumulate insights, ideas, quotes, and drawings with the end goal of capturing a body of knowledge in search of consilience: the aspiration that the cross-pollination of these various perhaps initially unrelated snippets can lead to spontaneous and unforeseen breakthroughs. Breakthroughs in both personal understanding and perhaps in the advancement of ongoing explorations in science, art, and social relations, individually and communally.
The rise of digital notetaking systems has amplified these aspirations, and provide means to push notetaking to new levels of sophistication and greater depth of understanding for users. However, the effective use of a notetaking systems like Obsidian, Notion, Roam Research and others requires more that reading the manual and jumping in.
Folio is a system to accomplish that aspiration in Obsidian.
I chose the name based on the notion of a book or manuscript made from folding sheets of paper in half, leading to four pages each, and those stitched together and bound. But it’s just metaphorical, since the Folio system does not really involve printed materials.
Folio is a consolidation of many aspects of Obsidian's notetaking capabilities, starting with the primitives of its form of markdown, as well as more complex and sophisticated functionality from core and community plugins. Folio is also a set of principles and practices intended to support the development of a deep base of knowledge for whatever domains the user wishes to explore, and to assist the user in generating new insights, personal understanding of these domains, and perhaps the creation of new materials advancing communal understanding as well. This can be considered networked notetaking, meaning notetaking directed toward those aims.
Setting Context
This note is intended to motivate and summarize a system for notetaking, an activity with a long history. However, this is not a recitation of the history of notetaking, but rather the description of one such system, which I call Folio, the outgrowth of decades of notetaking as part of my work. (In the next installment of this series, I will outline the tools I have used for notetaking over the years, leading to Obsidian.)
A tool must be considered in the context of its use -- not just in terms of its constituent parts -- and in particular, from an understanding of the aims of the tool user, and the principles of the tool builder.
In the case of Folio my aim as a user is to support, as fully as possible, my activities as a researcher and writer.
The constituent parts have to be understood, however, to achieve those aims: there is no way to grasp Folio without learning how the notetaking tool Obsidian works, since Folio relies on Obsidian functionality, and on the application of that functionality in a closely defined manner.
As the developer of Folio, I consolidated aspects of Obsidian's capabilities, starting with the primitives of its form of markdown, as well as more complex and sophisticated capabilities from core and a few community plugins.
The principles that motivated my development of Folio were a mixture of practice and theory. For example, I wanted a system that would avoid copying information, and where all information could be retrieved on demand through simple mechanisms, like the built-in search functionality of Obsidian, and the relationships between Obsidian’s files (or notes) via Obsidian links.
On the other hand, I wanted to steer clear of a dependency on certain complex plug-ins like Dataview or the Tasks system commonly employed by other notetaking systems. I will defer the rationale for those choices for later parts of this series.
At the same time, some necessary aspects of my work as a researcher and writer are strongly shaped by my experience. As one example, consider work management. After decades of using (and analyzing) various tools and techniques for managing tasks as primary elements of project management, I have come to certain hypotheses grounded in perceptions of project timeframe.
That viewpoint strongly informs the way that I manage work in Folio.
Also, as both a user and builder of Folio, I wanted a solution that could evolve over time, and it has. This is the characterization then of Folio in May 2024. A year from now, it may have changed in unpredictable ways for unpredictable reasons.
Folio: An Introduction
At the highest level, Folio is an ultrastructure of practices (and the principles animating them) that builds on the base infrastructure of Obsidian’s digital artifacts that capture the status and content of the user's work.
The infrastructure is principally Obsidian and it’s many pieces, parts, and implicit practices. This includes various sorts of folders and files, mostly Obsidian markdown documents, but also PDFs, images, and an occasional Google Doc.
The infrastructure includes the use of conventions and plugins, such as the Kanban plugin, cross-Obsidian links (wikilinks), and capabilities like search queries, annotation of PDFs, and many more. These tools are in wide use, and are not in anyway exclusive to Folio. (In subsequent installments I will zoom in on various constituents of Folio, like how I employ Kanbans, and why I use certain plugins.)
The ultrastructure of Folio is based on what I call frame rate and frameworks.
By frame rate I am referring to the time dimension of notetaking. For example, Folio relies quite heavily on flows like daily, weekly, and monthly notes to manage projects of various durations. These notes are managed in specific folders organized my timestamps. (Today’s daily note is titled `2024-05-17`, and is found in the folder `/00 journal/2024 daily notes`. The creation of daily notes is handled by the Periodical Notes plugin, but could be located elsewhere and managed through other means.)
Another aspect of frame rate is the duration of projects: some projects exist for a short period of time, while some are, in effect, immortal. Therefore I need two sorts of project Kanbans — since I rely on Kanbans for project and work management — to manage these disparate sorts of projects.
That distinction — between let’s call them bounded and unbounded projects — is a good introduction to frameworks: the complement to the frame rate dimension of Folio. A bounded Kanban may take this form (here with descriptive text):
In practice, the framework of a bounded project would be connected to the timing of other events, as in a notation made in a daily note following the confirmation of an engagement with Jones Co.
This might be that notation made in today’s daily note, `2024-05-17`, following up on an email received from Carla Fong at Jones Co. This is shown in Obsidian source mode, and then in edit mode:
The H3 heading includes an internal link to an existing note: `ºjones.co`. In Folio, a note starting with a `º` (option-0) references an organization. The internal link `@Carla Fong` is a person note. Both of these notes have aliases.
The internal link `[[jones.co bounded kanban]]` references a Kanban for the project: the link is pale because the Kanban has not been created yet. By clicking it, though, it is created, and with a bit of editing:
Looking at the `ºjones.co` note, and toggling the `show backlinks` you’ll see why it’s worthwhile to mention the organization name in each Kanban card:
And of course, searching for all references to `ºjones.co` also works.
Conclusion
This is just a short introduction, and in the rest of the series I will lay out more of the details Folio’s many parts, and how they come together to raise notetaking into knowledge creation.
Here’s a foretaste. I have been researching for several years what I have come to call the politically `+disaffected`— people with formerly left-leaning principles, but who have grown distrustful of established political parties. This is the graph related to the concept, limited to only two connections away from the central node:
This is a knowledge graph based on the concept, available for me to roam, expand, synthesize, and develop new insights. Consilience at my fingertips. As a researcher and writer such a graph is a powerful tool.
In the next installment in the series I will talk about my history of notetaking, unbounded projects, and how timing is everything in Folio… and in life.