About Forestry and this Digital Garden | Stowe Boyd
Ever since I was in college (in the seventies and eighties, BS and MS), I have been taking copious notes. At first that was analog notebooks. But as soon as it became practical I switched to digital journaling. Over the years I have used dozens of tools: Evernote, Dynalist, Dropbox Paper, Notion, and many, many others. I have amassed over 20,000 notes: either notes I have written, or source materials for my work and research.
Some years ago, I shifted to a local files-first philosophy, based on markdown, and adopted Typora as my markdown editor. In 2021, I shifted to Obsidian, which is a platform that goes far beyond journaling, but is at its core, a markdown editor. This note is not an introduction to markdown or Obsidian. Those can be found in many places.
On Obsidian, I have about 15,000 markdown notes, as well as thousands of PDFs and images. Obsidian provides a way for me to manage that without going crazy.
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A digression on my knowledge base and its elements.
Obsidian can be thought of as a knowledge base, and in my case, I have structured my instance of Obsidian explicitly as a system for knowledge management. I use various conventions to distinguish between references to
- people (like
@Albert Einstein,@Brian Eno, and@Joy Harjo), - concepts (like
+workslop,+economics, and+time is a flat circle), - organizations (like
ºWorld Economic Forum,ºTrader Joes, andºSocial Security Administration), - places (like
~France,~Washington DC, and~Rust Belt), and - projects (like
•workfutures.io,how to use time,•decision making, andstoweboyd.io).
All these sorts of knowledge references can be sprinkled liberally within markdown text. For example, here's a passage from a newspaper article I've annotated:
Among once powerful lawyers, journalists, politicians, academics and lobbyists who have made up official Washington for the past few decades, the feeling is one of impotence, fear and frustration.
The hallmark of this administration is cruelty and sadism, vengefulness carried out with glee. Mr. Musk said it best: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” The prominent historian Michael Beschloss said during Mr. Trump’s last campaign that a second term could lead to “dictatorship and anarchy.” At the time, he was accused of being alarmist. Not anymore.
“Everybody in Washington is being tested today,” says Leon Wieseltier, the editor of the literary review Liberties. “The question is: What can we do? It’s a time when we all have to ask: What am I capable of? It’s time for people to ask: What am I willing to die for?”
Several names and the concept +empathy are annotated. (In the case of +empathy the markdown is this --
-- which uses an alias pointing to the file named +empathy, but displaying without the +.
All of these knowledge annotations represent links to files in the knowledge base. I am explaining this so that you can wander from reference to reference, simply by clicking the links.
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One of the many things that an Obsidian user can do is to create a digital garden: basically, a website which is made up of published notes from Obsidian markdown files. Obsidian supports the creation of links from one file to another, based on so-called wiki links: [[filename]]. And Obsidian maintains the graph of cross-file references, and can display that, as shown in the graph widget in the lower half of this note.
At any rate, the garden -- found at stoweboyd.forestry.md -- is implemented using the Forestry.md hosting service, using the Digital Garden system. This is not an ad. I am just a happy user.