turning Augustine of Hippo's book "The City of God", which he finished around 426AD, into a linked markdown document in Obsidian. Ive dont this to a couple books by converting them to .txt from PDF, and then reading through them and organizing them into linked documents. This process is helping me understand what is being written in unexpected ways. In seeing how its structured, you get a peek into the logic of the author, and it opens up the overall theme of what is being written. It chose this book kind of at random, but im seeing how relevant it is to now. It describes the decline of collapse of Rome from a first person perspective, the lies people told themselves to cope, and what the real reasons actually were. Then uses this as a basis for describing what a better civilization might look like.

Solomon wasnt lying then he wrote, "There is nothing new under the sun"

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

I didn't realize you converted books to Markdown yourself. Masterful 🤌

Explain in slightly simpler terms?

He converted a book into the most simple of formatting called Markdown which almost anything can read including a note taking application called Obsidian.

He's using Obsidian to link ideas, chapters, passages of the book to other ideas, chapters, passages of the book using the Obsidian tools.

In this way patterns emerge that are not always visible when reading a book.

Here are some screenshots from my Obsidian work.

This is a graph of how all the notes I have made on the books I have read start to "link up" with other ideas from other books. Each small dot is a note and the big dots are the books those notes come from. If I click a dot the note I wrote opens and also shows me what other notes I linked to that note.

It's like a second brain and as I go back through what I have done I start to see patterns.

yeah whut he said 👆

This is awesome. Thanks. I need to try this out. I didn’t know about it.

I do this with books but the manual way. Go find the book on the shelf, the underlines and notes and reference it with another situation, note or book.

It's straight up zettlekasten but digital.

Obsidian is free and you can get it here: https://obsidian.md/

I recommend watching some of Milo's YT videos about how to use it.

You can find them here: https://www.youtube.com/@linkingyourthinking

The nostr Alexandria project seems relevant to this

yeah i love the idea 🙂