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I\u2019m working on the second edition of \u2018How to fix your academic writing trouble\u2019<\/a>\u00a0with\u00a0Katherine Firth<\/a>\u00a0at the moment. We\u2019re doing a new chapter on writing process, specifically how to think with generative AI tools. For inspiration, I am thinking about Artist Studios and how they support making work.<\/p>\n Artist studios are filled with tools and materials for creating, as well as storage for supplies and finished works. At the center of any decent artist\u2019s studio is a workbench, where projects come to life. An artist\u2019s studio is also a place of self expression: filled with inspiring objects to prompt the Artist\u2019s creativity. Here\u2019s what ChattieG\u2019s DALLE3 thinks that looks like:<\/p>\n Not bad.<\/p>\n As a writer with a background in architecture, I no longer have a physical studio, but I still consider myself an artist of sorts, just with words. Over the past 20 years, I\u2019ve generated a staggering amount of text files in my laptop hard drive. I have polished pieces \u2013 dissertations, books and articles \u2013 as well as half-finished drafts and abandoned ideas.<\/p>\n With each new computer, I\u2019ve simply cloned the files from the previous one, avoiding the tedious task of cleaning up. As a result, my file mess has multiplied. Some of my best writing is all but lost, buried deep inside my digital freezer in a folder labelled \u2018drafts May 2022\u2019, or something similarly unhelpful. If I think about the inside of my laptop, it\u2019s like a disorganised post office, with piles of unopened mail. I asked Chattie to make me a picture of this thought too:<\/p>\n Yeah, not bad Chattie. That\u2019s how the interior of my computer\u00a0feels<\/em>. Maybe you can relate? Even if you are only at the start of your PhD, you are probably generating un-opened letters at a furious rate.<\/p>\n To be truly creative amidst this writerly mess, we need something to gently hold all that text, much like an artist\u2019s studio supports the creation of art.\u00a0Enter\u00a0<\/strong>Obsidian.\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>Obsidian is a database program, but that\u2019s a bit like saying a library is merely a book storage facility. Obsidian is an elaborate knowledge management system for writers. It can hold thousands of bits and pieces of writing, both finished and unfinished, in a loosely organized way, allowing you to create with confidence, knowing that nothing is ever lost.<\/p>\n Obsidian works with\u00a0markdown files<\/a>\u00a0(.md), which are essentially text files with some extra formatting. The Obsidian interface supports linking between these files, so individual pieces of writing become pages of your own personal Wikipedia. You can also access PDFs and images with Obsidian, enabling you to build a rich set of resources for your writing. A collection of these markdown notes, PDFs, and images is called an\u00a0Obsidian Vault.<\/strong>\u00a0A Vault stored locally on your hard drive can accessed by Obsidian and any other programs that can read markdown, like MS Word, making your notes more portable.<\/p>\n Obsidian is a different kind of writing environment built for the digital world, not to mimic analogue processes. If you think about it, MS Word is a digital form of a typewriter: producing digital letters, which sit in digital envelopes, stuffed inside digital pigeonholes. Because you can\u2019t easily see\u00a0inside<\/em>\u00a0all those files, you get the messy post office problem. By contrast, Obsidian is more like a terrarium \u2013 or one of those self contained eco-domes they lock people inside for five years to see if we could live on Mars. All your writing is viewable and searchable within a single interface.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve written about Obsidian before as a way to keep notes for your PhD<\/a>\u00a0but I think I under sold the potential. It\u2019s an incredibly powerful program, but so exquisitely customisable that teaching people how to use it is really hard. There is no single \u201cright way\u201d to set it up because every writer is different. Like an artist\u2019s studio, the perfect Obsidian setup is a work of creation in its own right.<\/p>\n After talking about the teaching problem with my pod co-host Dr Jason Downs on the\u00a0last episode of On The Reg<\/a>, I decided to set up a sample Obsidian Vault. I created\u00a0Coffee Vault<\/strong>\u00a0by imagining myself as a researcher working on, well \u2013 the topic of coffee. It\u2019s got a simple file structure and only two plug ins. Think of my Coffee Vault as a seed for your own Obsidian terrarium. Feel free to adapt it to your needs or start from scratch\u2014we\u2019re all different kinds of artists, and what works for me might not work for you.<\/p>\n You can download the Coffee Vault from\u00a0my GitHub page<\/a>, install it on your computer, and start exploring. It\u2019s a good idea to look at the\u00a0ReadMe file<\/a>\u00a0first, which has a set of instructions for the plug ins and some teaching notes. If you don\u2019t want to download, you can simply\u00a0\u00a0go to this GitHub link, to see the file structure and look inside the individual notes to see how it works.\u00a0<\/a>My sample Vault holds a bunch of writing (composed with ChattieG and Claude Opus).<\/p>\n My Vault has a (kind of) logic developed after a lot of trial and error. I also watched countless videos of dudes talking about their Vaults on YouTube so you don\u2019t have to (you\u2019re welcome). The Coffee Vault has a logical structure inspired by\u00a0Tiago Forte\u2019s PARA system.<\/a>\u00a0It includes an\u00a0Inbox<\/strong>\u00a0for temporary storage, a\u00a0Projects<\/strong>\u00a0folder with subfolders for work in progresss, in this case a dissertation and book proposal. I have a\u00a0Freezer<\/strong>\u00a0for deep storage of valuable past writing, a\u00a0Carpark<\/strong>\u00a0for notes and thoughts, an\u00a0Images<\/strong>\u00a0folder for visual resources, and a\u00a0Zotero<\/strong>\u00a0folder for academic references.<\/p>\n While my sample vault is currently lightly populated in terms of content and links between documents, you can see the emerging structure using the \u201cgraph view\u201d function:<\/p>\n The\u00a0Projects<\/strong>\u00a0folder has two subfolders: one for a dissertation about Coffee and the other for a book proposal. If you go to the Book proposal note, you will see how I am working on pieces of the proposal as separate notes, with the book proposal outline as a kind of \u2018contents\u2019 page:<\/p>\n By distilling the task of the book proposal into separate notes linked to a \u2018home page\u2019, I can focus on one section at a time and avoid the temptation to \u2018polish\u2019 already finished text. In this way Obsidian allows you to write in \u2018chunks, not chapters\u2019, following advice offered by Pat Thomson and Barbara Kamler in their excellent book\u00a0\u2018Helping Doctoral students write\u2019<\/a>\u00a0(Pat continues to blog on\u00a0Patter<\/a>).<\/p>\n The\u00a0Freezer<\/strong>\u00a0folder is my imaginary \u2018deep storage\u2019 for text. Like most working researchers, I have a stock of past grant applications, briefing notes, reports, magazine articles and blog posts inside my\u00a0 Recently, I wrote\u00a0an article about Claude Opus for the AARE blog<\/a>\u00a0with only two prompts and a few edits. People were genuinely shocked by my mad skills of Claude, but it was possible to write this article in around 10 minutes because I already had plenty of finished examples of similar writing in my Vault. I simply showed Claude some of these samples, then wrote a list of the points I wanted to make in the article. Claude does me better than me \u2013 sometimes*. Many of us will write this way in the future, so you should think of all your finished writing as your own store of training data. Obsidian can help you keep this valuable past IP tidy and accessible.<\/p>\n The\u00a0Carpark<\/strong>\u00a0is the place I put what I typically think of as \u2018notes\u2019 \u2013 tentative thoughts finding their way into writing but not yet fit for public consumption. The Carpark is really my attempt to build a\u00a0Zettelkasten<\/a>: a note taking method documented in Sonke Ahren\u2019s\u00a0How to Take Smart Notes<\/a>. There\u2019s a lot of buzz about the Zettelkasten idea, with a lot of dudes on YouTube making big claims that working this way will change your life\u2026 In my experience the Zettelkasten doesn\u2019t work quite as advertised, but every writer needs a place to store thoughts and Obsidian\u2019s ability to make links between these thoughts is useful.<\/p>\n I have a separate folder for\u00a0Images,<\/strong>\u00a0mostly so I can easily locate them when it comes time to publish something. Finally I have a\u00a0Zotero<\/strong>\u00a0folder. The Zotero Integration plug in enables me to highlight text and make notes on PDFs inside Zotero and sync them into Obsidian. The plug in relies on a template file to format the notes and highlights into markdown. It took me a long time to get this bit of my Vault functional, so I\u2019ve supplied my\u00a0Zotero integration template<\/a>\u00a0based on an example supplied by Peter Hayes (thanks Peter!). I\u2019ve included some notes on how to set it up in the\u00a0ReadMe file.<\/a><\/p>\n Setting up an Obsidian Vault may seem complicated \u2013 that\u2019s because it is. If you\u2019re new to the program, you might want to start by simply installing Obsidian (it\u2019s free) and experimenting with its features before diving into my Coffee Vault. At the very least I hope I have inspired you to explore Obsidian\u2019s potential. Stay tuned for the second edition of \u2018How to fix your academic Writing Trouble\u2019 \u2013 we hope to have it out in the new year.<\/p>\n *I wrote the first version of this post and put it into Claude Opus to see it if could be improved. Claude did an ok job, but seemed to struggle with the step by step detail and the quirks of my writer\u2019s voice, which is weird because other times it\u2019s done a bang up job.\u00a0Maybe it thinks it\u2019s the spring break?<\/a>\u00a0Anyway, I used some of what it gave me, but this one is mostly what Mr Thesiswhisperer calls IngerGPT<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"\"](\"https:\/\/world.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/Dalle3.jpg\")
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<\/p>\nmessy digital post office<\/del>\u00a0laptop. I also have a bunch of references for people and old peer review reports. All these are relatively polished \u2018genre pieces\u2019 that hold extrodinary value as a personal store of training data for generative AI tools.<\/p>\n