My Second Brain
I’ve just started doing a PhD (you’ll be able to work out the topic is from the images below), and I’m interested in the whole idea of doing a PhD “in public” and the use of Wikis and other Personal Knowledge Management tools to support them.
Wikis
The most basic approach (but still novel to many) is to just use a Wiki (like my nascent one at http://taunoyen.com/wiki/doku.php?id=phd) to track/showcase/garner comment on your PhD. Here are some examples (and with some ideas I might steal):
But surely we can do more than just that?
Digital and Data Gardens
Digital Gardens is a term that has emerged quite recently to describe uncurated collections of notes and thoughts on the web (unlike a more curated web site or even blog). There’s a good article on it at https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history, and I note that even one of the more venerable tools mentioned below has started to position itself in this “digital gardening” space.
This is sort of related to what some of us in Second Life used to call “data gardens”, where you’d create a 3D space/park/garden which people could wander round and it would be full of the information and data (often as 3D objects and 3D visualisations) about a particular topic. You can find an article on that at https://thinkbalm.com/thinkbalm-data-garden-is-live/. A more recent implementation, using the memory palace as a metaphor is this one on Sun Tzu’s Art of War.
Would be great to re-produce something like that for the PhD in Frames or Mozilla Hubs so that anyone can access it on computer, mobile or HMD.
Personal Knowledge Management
Another emerging form is the Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system. Most people are familiar with OneNote and Evernote, but these tools go a step further, typically offering some form of tagging and a set of layout tools and functional modules that rival professional Wiki systems like Confluence. Systems in this category include Notion and RevNote. RevNote seems more aimed at students and revision. Notion I really liked the look of when I tried it, working on PC and iPad is great, and the layout tools are ace. It did though seem to have templates that forced structure on you that you then had to undo. The real downer though was that it was missing the one feature I really wanted…
A Second Brain
For ages I’ve played on and off around with Ray Kurzweil’s The Brain application — even trying to use it as a Prezi alternative for presentations at one point. It looked gorgeous, with lovely dynamic force-graph driven semantic knowledge graphs/mind-maps of your notes, but the note taking was cumbersome and featureless and I always struggled with it. A few years ago I heard of Roam Research, which is a list driven note-taking app, but which features backlinks (so as to trace back references), block level tagging and a slightly static knowledge graph visualisation. I played with it until the demo licence expired, but again I found its enforced list approach a bit off-putting, and the graphics underwhelming, even if some of the features were top rate. Both however are examples of what has been called the “second brain” concept.
Then last week (March 2022) I decided the time had come to make a choice between Notion and Roam, but in hunting out tutorial and comparison videos (I’d recommend this one and this one) I discovered Obsidian.
Obsidian
Obsidian may not look the prettiest (at least in note taking mode) but it’s the best implementation I’ve seen yet of this “second brain” concept. Note taking is quick and fast into a blank page, using Markdown syntax, and images and even PDFs can just be pasted into the page. The only thing I really miss are the tables from Notion, but there are hundreds of community extensions for Obsidian, some of which have better tables than the default. Notes can be put in folders, but that is purely for human admin.
What binds notes are the links you put in from one to another (again backlinks) and the tags. I’m already finding that taking notes is just as fast as taking them into a Word or text document, and the fact that I can do it on the iPad is ideal when working one handed whilst reading a book. The key though is to enter every important concept you mention as a hashtag, as that not only links the notes in a graph, but also lets you just click on a hashtag in a note to see every other note with that hashtag! There’s a nice tag directory pane, and it autocompletes tags in the iOS version (which actually has a better featured editor than the web version).
As you build your notes the graph view builds automatically. When fully zoomed out the “clustering” of your notes and concepts becomes apparent (as do orphans), and key nodes which link different clusters together. This is what I’ve created in less than a week, lovely!
Zooming in you can begin to see the detail, with note and tag names.
Hovering on a node highlights all its links, helping you to see connectivity between ideas more clearly.
The one downside is that although the graph shows the tag links and note links on the same graph, and connects pages to their own tags, you do sort of have two different ontologies to manage, pages and tags. I also can’t find a way yet to link tags to other tags, other than via a page, so I can’t start instantiating an ontology. It does have something called nested tags (e.g. #battle/ramadi) but whilst that shows up as an indented tree on the tag list it doesn’t link #battle to #battle/ramadi on the network graph :-(. Within those community plug-ins I mentioned there are already a number that implement different network graph algorithms, so I should be able to use them to start to analyse the graph and perhaps yield new insights that I hadn’t spotted, and maybe get closer to implementing an ontology.
One of the other big plusses of Obsidian is how it stores your data — it’s all flat-file markdown files, one per note, on your PC. For something like a PhD with a 5–6 year life I need to know my data is safe and if the company folds I can get all that information I’ve created. This approach delivers that — particularly as I store my “vaults” on my Dropbox account, so they’re backed up, and versioned, there. Obsidian sync then provides near real time (~2–3 seconds!) word by word sync between your PC and any other devices, and with iOS and Android apps that means you can have your whole Second Brain on your mobile device.
The proof of the pudding is probably in the fact that I’ve already started using Obsidian to support a literature review task on my paid work (OK there’s a fair amount of overlap topic wise).
Second Brain and Virtual Personas?
But of course I can’t stop there. A big step forward at Daden was when we started using knowledge graphs to store the “brain” of a chatbot as part of our work on virtual personas. I’m now dumping my PhD into a Second Brain which supports something like a knowledge graph (OK not to RDF/OWL standards but I’m sure that can be fixed). So that’s got me thinking, if I crack on with my new architecture chatbot (NodeJS+ML+Grammatical Parser+SPARQL+Triplestore) then can I eventually add the Obsidian knowledge graph to it — and get the bot to sit my viva for me?! Let’s see how I get on with that….
But the key point here is that if more people start to use these technologies and approaches to start to build their own “Second Brain”, then a lot more of the ground work required to create their own virtual persona will already be happening. Virtual Personas will, as I’ve said before, become something that evolves out of activities you are already doing, not something that requires a vast amount of one-off creation activity. And that may, just may, bring those ideas of Digital Immortality one step closer.
