hello folks today's video is going to be with courtney applewhite who is a student
and what she's going to do very kindly today is share how she uses obsidian now this has
been available inside the obsidian course for a couple of weeks now you can check that out in
the link in the description but a huge thanks to courtney for coming here on the channel
hello everyone and welcome back to the keep productive youtube channel it is francesco here
today we're very lucky to be joined by courtney applewhite who is going to be
diving into her obsidian account so um courtney maybe you can introduce yourself
a little bit more about what you're studying and what you're working on at the moment
sure um so i'm a phd student at the university of california santa barbara i've just completed my
qualifying exams in religious studies that's what i'm studying i specifically work on north
american religious traditions but my focus is on death rituals um within the contemporary
united states so that's my area of study um i just yeah i just completed my qualifying exams
and that's what i've been using my obsidian account for most recently because that takes up
100 of my time i bet yeah that's quite an upbeat topic isn't it
how did you get into that in the first place just out of curiosity sure so i worked at the
medical examiner's office out of college i worked as a deaf investigator so that
is the person hits it's sort of like the coroner's office so we go to scenes of um unexpected or
sometimes you know violent deaths and record information and and bring that person back to
the medical examiner's office so i worked that was my work for several years and i decided to
go back to get the phd in order to learn a little bit more about the the ritualization
process i specifically look at people who are not necessarily religious so the studies department
is a funny fit for me but um i yeah so i'm looking at how people are are making sense of
those moments that i sort of witnessed firsthand so that's where i how i transitioned wow so a lot
of sort of studying a lot of information sort of coming your way and that and my my first question
is more about like how did you find obsidian because there uh obviously a lot of talk around
other apps like rome and things like that how how did you pick the one of obsidian from all of those
well this was a a really challenging process for me i was actually originally recommended rome so
i i took a look at that and that was just from i was listening to productivity podcasts like your
own and i was sort of trying to decide how i wanted to manage because in the qualifying
exam process i had to read approximately 300 items books and articles and then sit for three separate
written exams where i was given a set of questions and then asked to reproduce certain
amounts of knowledge from that set of data so it was a huge amount of information and i
was in the midst of it when i realized i wasn't managing it well i wasn't i didn't have
clear access to it i had it in like each of the books and articles were noted in separate google
docs and they weren't talking to each other and i was having trouble making sense of it
so i was listening to these productivity podcasts and a lot of people were saying knowledge
management you know look at rome and so i started to look at rome and i watched a lot of those sort
of comparative youtube where they're looking at all the different knowledge management tools
i landed on obsidian um a slightly like in one sense because i'm a bit paranoid and i
wanted to be sure that i had these notes it was so critical for me to like maintain them
so i wanted them local locally stored and then i also backed them up using my google drive so that
was like a double i was able to back them up but i wanted them to also be locally stored and then i
liked the interface a little bit more i played around with rome a little bit i got the i think
that they offered like a free trial so i was able to take a look at it and i just i sort of was more
attracted to the interface for obsidian and um i i recognized that i think that i also just felt
a little bit more um comfortable with the way that people were talking about using obsidian
like on the different boards uh rome cult felt a little uh like a lot for me for being like a first
timer i guess in the knowledge management world uh obsidian felt a little bit more um sort of
not as intense in some ways like i felt like i could just use it without really joining rome cult
and maybe there's a reason that that's a thing but uh so that's just sort of how i decided on
it it was it was just it did what i needed it to do it was stored locally and i really enjoyed the
interface sure brilliant yeah i mean i'm curious like did you ever use like a like a note-taking
app or another thing you mentioned google docs but did you use something because you like i
don't know whether it's the same in the us but you do like your phd later on but you do like your
bachelor's before is it it's the same over there did you use like a note-taking app before then
um no i you know i i i had this bit of a gap between my bachelor's and my phd and although
i'm sure there were i graduated college in in 2014 and there weren't quite as many of these sort of
next-generation note-taking apps in college i i used a combination of like you know word
documents and physical notebooks yeah which has been horribly tedious later on just getting all
that information back into like any sort of like computer without hauling around like 400 notebooks
yeah so i really didn't i'm i kind of transitioned from not using any sort of note-taking online or
or digital note-taking method apart from from word documents and um sort of jumped right into this
so you can definitely see the change from that work we're documenting about this right yeah
absolutely brilliant um courtney would you be kind enough to show us a little bit more about
how you use obsidian so sure so this is the graph view uh i think i think that this is uh
pretty cool i use this uh i used this when i was doing my review cycle so i just
sort of overview like how i use this particular page i use this during the review cycle because
the each of these uh giant nodes that you see here are components of questions that i was
going to be asked so i was i was given some sort of foresight into the the types of questions i
would add was asked for my qualifying exams and so these are subsections of each of those questions
and so you have like uh i was going to be asked about spiritual secular and religious people
and the differences and similarities between them so this hub is spiritual
and it's linked to the book and article notes that i i thought were relevant to that topic
and then those books speak to other articles or in conversation with other articles and so
as i was going through and doing my review cycle where i was trying to make sense of these things
i would sort of use this as to sort of think about okay like who was in conversation with who
during this what were they saying and so i used it in that way to sort of make those connections
as i was thinking through how i would answer these types of questions um and then so just to
backtrack a little bit i used this question analysis so this is i think that this is fairly
uh a fairly common setup these are like maps of max maps of content and i didn't really name
them as such but i've sort of borrowed this idea from productivity circles and i sort of used this
to outline my this question analysis to outline what i thought the different subsections of each
question would be these are the names of my joe david and anna the names of my advisors so each of
them are going to ask me a set of questions and so i broke down what i thought the most likely
aspects of those questions would be and so then on my um my bar over here i sort of just made little
pages for each of them so these are the top sort of has the questions that i think we're
going to be asked and then this page was actually created last so i after i had compiled all of my
notes and articles and books i basically began compiling how i would answer those questions in
these sort of like map of content uh areas so we have things like spiritual secular secularization
so these are all things that i thought i would be asked and with the accompanying notes and you can
sort of see on the sidebar here that i have all of them linked and so what i would do is um the
the book notes themselves were tagged in this way so for example i'm just going to click over and
this one was tagged under secularization and i have ha like hashtags throughout that sort of give
me more specifics about that and so whenever i was compiling how i would answer the question if we go
back to secularization i would sort of click over to these um you know if i i would split screen
and sort of click over to these to sort of see how they might fit into this larger question
that i'm building and i do this sort of um with each of these sub sections of those questions um
find another one that's actually filled out here so this is another example so i have the question
at the top i see that there's linked mentions over here so i just sort of click over and figure out
how i want to incorporate this particular note into this question and what i tend to do you can
sort of see me doing it here is i basically boil down what i think the most salient parts of this
larger note are into my map of content um if as i continue to refine this what i'll likely do is
create um sort of very short summaries at the top i sort of ran into a time constraint with
with taking my exams but in an ideal scenario i'd sort of already have like a quick summary
of these book notes sort of at the top that i could then easily transfer into sort of questions
and that's how i was using it i built out all the questions in these maps of content and then that
gave me a place to so then i would review that go back through and fill out what i thought were
the salient parts of each of those articles that were tagged and or backlinked and then
whenever i actually came to do my exam i sort of already had i knew i didn't have these notes
available to me but i had already compiled them in a way that i was able to remember sure and um just
out of curiosity did you like follow some sort of process from somebody in the productivity space to
organize this layer or was it something that sort of naturally came to you when you were setting
things up sure so i i owe a basically this entire setup to uh at cal historian so if he listens
so um yeah so i i got on the discord channel for obsidian and because i was trying to figure out
the most sensible way to go about because this is just a massive amount of data i have something
like i think there's over i mean i think there's easily over like 250 notes here and um there's
just so much data and i just didn't really know how to organize it but he i believe he's also a
scholar because he was sort of speaking from that experience and he recommended this kind of setup
so i really went off of his recommendation from the discord conversation that we had and was able
to build it out in this way and then i sort of just refined it specific he gave me sort of the
idea for having the maps of content breaking down the questions and then i sort of refined it using
my own sense of how i wanted it to be backlinked how i wanted them to communicate with each other
and then the addition of tags and things like that fantastic and out of curiosity when it comes to
like the revision aspect of it um do you use the graph view for that when you're like looking at
particular subjects or is it just like opening up loads of different notes and sort of navigating
it like that i use the graph view i actually did use the graph view a lot i found it to prepare
the value but i'll just bring it back up here um it doesn't look like the it's almost became
very cluttered at the end because there's just so many things here and they're like really well
organized but yeah so what i would basically do is i would come over here and sort of grab the
spiritual for example and then i would try and you know just basically looking at that sort of give
myself an overview of the kind of answer that i would give for this so i would say like okay so uh
i just see the you know keratin king article which is a critique of the notion of spirituality and i
was like who else was critiquing spirituality and i would try to quiz myself before i gave myself
like a clear line to that and say so if someone's going to ask me about the critique of spirituality
how would i who else would i wrap in there and then sort of quiz myself and say oh okay
so mark singleton also has this critique jeffrey kreifel that i can also see how that's connected
to secularization and then i would try to jump to that and just have like a fluidity because there's
two components to the qualifying exam there's um the writtens and then you have to do an oral
defense so i wanted to be ready start preparing myself for both the fluidity and my thinking as i
was going to need to answer the written exams but also being able to have that conversation in mind
uh as i go to defend when they're going to be asking me questions about the the things that i've
responded to so i wanted to be able to do both of those things so that's sort of how i use this i
sort of just used it as a way to quiz myself because it it blanks it in a way right so you
can sort of see mine in particular it's pretty cluttered so i can't really see like for example
who you know this one here saba mahmud is talking to so that's a way for me to quiz myself before i
shoot over to her little bubble so i did try i did try to do that to have that um yeah
fluidity i could definitely see why it would help with fluidity in terms of the studying
uh because it it definitely links everything up nice visually um i'm curious like what you would
recommend for say a student that's watching this uh or someone who's maybe a researcher
about how to get started um would you recommend say a set process or like exploring themselves
like do you have any recommendations if you were to put yourself in their shoes sure so
i'm probably drawing both from the fact that i do teach and my experience with obsidian here but
i think it's really useful for students particularly to begin with the ended mind
so if possible sort of determine the kind of
the kind of knowledge retrieval you're going to have to be doing so for example if you're using
this tool for this tool for studying for a test um knowing if you're going to have
a multiple choice test or an essay test and starting from there because i think that will
kind of determine how you might break down different kinds of information so i think
that that's always like a strong place to start and so for example if a student was using this to
build out for a for a multiple choice test or a fill in the blank test kind of thing
and they know the the the content ahead of time maybe they have chapters in a book or
something like that i think it's it's sensible to start with like maps of content that are larger
and like for example a chapter that has like a particular subject heading
and then breaking it down sort of as you need by smaller subjects so that's sort of how i started
as well you know there these if you notice on the sidebar here i sort of started with one like zero
one zero and then i went up to zero uh like one one two zero but i had to fill in so then this
section has zero five zero zero five five zero five six zero five seven because i had refined
meetings that then broke down the questions a little bit further so i think that that's
a place that you can start and and researchers in the same way i think that you sort of begin
all your research processes with like a research question and breaking down the aspects of that
question to understand what kind of knowledge you need to put into the different elements so
i think in that sense you could have a section that's about your methodology
you could have a section that's about you know the lit review you're gonna have to do that's what
i think that you know sort of jumping ahead a little bit this this particular graph that i have
here is going to be really useful for whenever i am creating new content for literature reviews and
things like that because it has if i'm writing an article about spirituality i have a node here that
specifically speaks to that so i think that you know from a project a project basis that's sort of
how you can think about it and with larger content larger knowledge management i think that it's just
you just sort of expand that same that same framework maybe sure i love the idea of like
thinking of the end before you start which is good because that like it sets you on the right route
um and i guess my final question is more around like do you use it in a personal context as well
as say like a a journal like a personal duct tape or anything like that yes i'm i'm starting to so i
i'm i'm working on i found i found that this process for me was a little easier
than incorporating into because i've never really used like a workflow this is something that's not
um yeah i mean it's not it's not really popular in academia i would say and maybe
some academics will fight me on this but but um i think that productivity is something that's
kind of new to academic circles and so there's not a lot of examples of how academics use it so it's
sort of like an adaptation but we're actually well suited to because like many people who are
as entrepreneurs or self-starters we do a lot we are very self-directed in our work we're sort of
choosing our own projects and so i think it's a really valuable tool so i'm still learning how to
do that i do have a personal one that i'm starting to work on that has my and i'm you know has my
sort of maps of content for personal areas of my life and then um or like my personal look
more personal recreational knowledge management so things about sports and like things like that um
and uh and i'm starting to do a sort of um daily process where i sort of have my
tasks and to-do lists and i'm starting to incorporate that as well i have more time to
to play with it now that this larger project is done that's it yeah you've got this vault done
now it's time to relax it i absolutely uh love this the way you've set things up and
it's definitely given me a few ideas for sure in terms of like setting up something like this um
but thank you so much for coming on courtney um is there anywhere i don't know whether peop you
wanted people to follow you after anything like that is there anywhere people can discover how
you you obviously through the likes of twitter that's how we found each other right yeah yeah
so i'm at see applewhite x on twitter i can't say that i'm a reliable tweeter but you're welcome
you're welcome to follow me there um yeah and that's that's probably the best place to find me
absolutely smashing thank you courtney for taking your time out yeah absolutely happy to be on
you