Note: Obsidian as a digital community archiving tool

This is a blogpost about a collaborative way to record information, in a intuitive text format (markdown) and live visualization as a network graph.

In various workshops in the field of museums and archives that I participated in in the last years, the facilitators were using a Miro digital whiteboard for assembling our input and draw visual connections between thoughts, or annotate images. These were then archived as PDF and sent to the participants.

What I find problematic about this approach, is that the digitale connections that were recorded are locked in the closed environment of Miro, a commercial platform. Due to the closed nature of the data, we can only use it as an image, and not as actual information on connected thoughts. So, while the digital activity is connecting thoughts in a digital environment, the result is nothing like that, but rather similiar to a flipchart poster rotting away in storage… Much more useful would be to interact in connecting information and then have it available as a record of these connections, which can be further worked with.

I see a political aspect to this, institutions like museums and archives keep their information in relation, through standardized records, or even knowledge graphs: chains of information around the objects, which follow a semantic logic, where the relations between entities are clearly defined.

The interactive and participatory activities around these records, in critical heritage workshops for example, are often not recorded in a similiar way. What I find interesting, that tools like Miro are actually close to such a recording, but due to their proprietary nature, the recording get’s locked in and transformed into an image. Better would be to interact like using a whiteboard, but have a record like in a knowledge graph.

In 2021 I was part of the cooArchi project (community oriented archiving interface), a software prototyping effort, which sought to create such a semantic whiteboard, an interface where people write connected information. We used a classic network graph visualization for that and designed two ways to add information, either by writing a triple A – relates this way to – B in our three field input form, or by pressing the plus on any node in the graph and add a relation and a new node:

This was a 6-month prototyping project, and it resulted in a working prototype which can be downloaded freely: https://github.com/cooarchi/cooarchi/releases. We also wrote a detailed documentation on the design choices and the politics of our development: https://cooarchi.github.io/documentation/.

To actually use cooArchi in a project proved a bit challenging. A real backend for managing the graph was missing, which would be necessary to fix input mistakes. Installation was not trivial. There was no funding after the initial 6 months granted by the Prototypefund (BMBF) to further develop the idea.

But some of the central ideas of our prototpye were still very important to me:

• To give participants an easy and intuitive way to write linked information.
• To visualize the collaborative writing of linked information, live.

Recently I tested another software to create a community archiving environment like cooArchi. I decided against a database, but to work with a note-taking software, which has functionality and extensions for the kind of semantic links that I want to write. Obsidian.md is such a software, with many open source plugins available that are constantly created by the community.

How to adapt Obsidian for a community archiving functionality:

With the software we write markdown files, text files with a very basic syntax. We can embed media, and record audio in the interface. We can visualize this as a network graph, which updates live as we create new notes/nodes. With markdown, a very reduced way to encode text, we can easily link notes, and also use hashtags to organize them. Basically our facilitators* or even the participants only have to learn how to:

• create a file (create note)
• link to another file, using these brackets: [[name of linked file]]
• embedd media, using !(description)[[filename]]

(*My current impression is, that it works best to have facilitators at the devices, who take the input of media like scans and photographs, spoken input, handwritten notes, etc. and input them into the notes. But also a short tutorial is possible, after which the participants directly write the digital notes.)

To actually write relational information, we update Obsidian with a plugin called Dataview, now we can:

• define relations through this syntax: type-of-relation::[[name of linked file]]
• and visualize these relations in the graph (through on more plugin called Graph link types)
  Dataview also allows us to work with the relations, to analyse them etc.

Finally, we want to do all of this on several devices (Computers, phones, etc.) live synchronized. For this there are several options available:

• A commercial service by Obsidian: Sync.
• A plugin called Remotely save which uses Nextcloud DAW or other cloud services (haven’t tested this one yet and don’t know about how it handles version conflicts and live collaboration) Update: I tried it now, and the free version doesn’t allow for live collaboration.
• A plugin called Self-hosted Livesynch that uses Object Storage to allow for live editing of the same file from different devices (which includes live updating of the graph). I tested it with IBM Cloudant as a storage and it worked. (Next step would be to try CouchDB on a computer, maybe even a Raspberry Pi).

In Obsidian, we can have a three column interface. On the left the files. Then our writing area. And on the right our graph. This would be my attempt at having something like our community archiving interface from 2021 with a note taking software, meaning without a database. The result is a folder of notes and media files that can be easily shared and reused. It can also be published as a wiki (including the graph view for easy overview).

Finally a little note on the hardware, this video shows the setup on two laptops. But it also works on phones. I like to bring cyberdecks (1, 2) as input devices, to neither have screens between participants, nor sit around with phones in our hands. But this is something for another note on digital community archiving.

Links:

• cooArchi
• Obsidian
• Obsidian plugins
  • Dataview
  • Graph link types
  • Self-hosted Livesynch

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