Roam Research: note-taking from a better timeline

May 27, 2020 1:33 PM

What is Roam Research and why are researchers and writers losing their minds over this note-taking/knowledge management/productivity app based on Zettelkasten and still in closed beta?

Are you using Roam? SPILL THE BEANS.

posted by Foci for Analysis (43 comments total)

more to the point, why are writers and researchers that primarily rely on the written word using YouTube to lose their minds?
posted by mwhybark at 1:35 PM on May 27, 2020 [12 favorites]

what's the big deal, I—

[clicks a few links]

WE WANTS IT
WE NEEDS IT
WE MUST HAVE THE PRECIOUS
posted by entropicamericana at 1:48 PM on May 27, 2020 [5 favorites]

I'm reminded of Ryan Holiday's "Commonplace Book" which I find WONDERFUL.
posted by Bill Watches Movies Podcast at 1:49 PM on May 27, 2020 [5 favorites]

if they hadn't lost their minds they'd still be writing, not blathering on Youtube
posted by scruss at 1:50 PM on May 27, 2020 [5 favorites]

So this app has invented... the hyperlink? Xanadu?

Actually, it looks like there are some really interesting and useful ideas in this tool. As someone who has been working on a Markdown-based note-taking/knowledgebase tool myself (because I couldn't find one that worked exactly how I wanted it to), I'm impressed.
posted by gwint at 1:51 PM on May 27, 2020 [3 favorites]

Some background on the Zettlekasten method.

Some ZTK tools.
posted by notyou at 1:54 PM on May 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

Correct me if I'm wrong but this app looks exactly like Workflowy?
posted by MiraK at 2:02 PM on May 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

it is a good and useful tool, although using it makes you feel more productive than you actually are, which is not necessarily a bad thing. it is definitely very similar to lots of other notetaking tools but is not the same.

the creator is very consciously influenced by the 70s/80s utopian ideas about hypertext. much like Project Xanadu, every link in Roam is bidirectional.

this is in fact the core feature out of which many other features are built. For example, the "TODO" functionality just works by making a hyperlink to a page titled "TODO". Then when you go to that page, you can see every inbound link, which is your todo list.

Every day gets its own page named something like "March 24th, 2020". If you wanted to schedule a reminder for "June 8th, 2020", you would just add a link to that page and the backlink will show up when you get to June 8th.

the other core feature is excellent support for rendered LaTeX math.
posted by vogon_poet at 2:04 PM on May 27, 2020 [20 favorites]

BUT WHAT DOES DAVE WINER THINK OF IT?
posted by chavenet at 2:04 PM on May 27, 2020 [10 favorites]

Bill Watches Movies Podcast: "I'm reminded of Ryan Holiday's "Commonplace Book" which I find WONDERFUL."

It's not his of course. But they are wonderful. As are index cards.
posted by chavenet at 2:08 PM on May 27, 2020

I bet Zim is jankier, but it's also free and available to all right now.

One of my favorite things about Zim, in contrast to other notebook apps I've seen, is that the data you put in all winds up in very ordinary file formats. Text files, JPG files, PNG files. No matter what happens to your Zim install or to Zim the institution, your data, and even quite a lot of its structure, is still accessible.
posted by Western Infidels at 2:10 PM on May 27, 2020 [3 favorites]

As are index cards.

...which Holiday's "book" is made of.

Inspired by Levenger's office supply pron catalog, I bought a cheap pack of Oxford brand vertical index cards and a wood playing card holder. It's very satisfying!
posted by Flannery Culp at 2:37 PM on May 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

I don't really get it. It's a wiki and Airtable smooshed together?
posted by dmd at 3:21 PM on May 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

I've been stalking this and related topics for a few months now. Link dump!

• Obsidian just hit public beta, local Roam style notes in Markdown
• org-roam for Emacs users
• A non-Zettelkasten use of Roam
• Roam style backlinks ported to TiddlyWiki

posted by Anonymous Function at 3:26 PM on May 27, 2020 [19 favorites]

What do you hope to use Roam for?

A Personal CRM
B Developing a Grand Unified Theory
C Reading Notes
D Short Form Writing
E Tasks and Projects
F Personal Knowledge Management
G Long form writing
H Studying and Spaced Repetition
I Reducing Existential Risk
J Mapping the Frontiers of Knowledge
K Other

posted by aniola at 3:29 PM on May 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

There was this Amiga thing that was a bit like HyperCard but based on the Microfiche concept. You could tell what was where from the tiny overview and drill down to all sorts of media and indexes and navigate around. I've often wondered if that idea was patented or why I haven't seen that since where that old '80s software seemed so awesome way before it's time. I'll have to RTFA to see if it's that awesome of a thing.

I haven't seen anything yet that gives that same feels of zooming around some slice of information so easily.
posted by zengargoyle at 5:20 PM on May 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

Is this the same concept as piggydb, which we previously discussed on the Blue long ago? If so, I spent several days trying to figure out how to make it work for me, and never got the hang of it. Maybe my brain doesn't work that way, but I'm still stuck, 5+ years later, with my ever expanding pile of mind maps, and would still love a better solution.
posted by KGMoney at 5:51 PM on May 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

This seems similar to DEVONthink, but without the ability to add pretty much any external file (unless I missed seeing that feature) and have it indexed and linked... but I’m always glad to see new personal knowledge bases/wikis pop up—it means if my preferred one ever goes away, I can find refuge in another.
posted by boisterousBluebird at 6:27 PM on May 27, 2020

I’m always wary of systems where my data is on a mainframe computer somewhere else. However I was curious about the buzz on this, so thanks for some insight into the mechanisms about the bidirectional links.

Hook does a rough-and-ready similar thing on the Mac, allowing any two arbitrary items of content to be linked together. I use it alongside DEVONthink and Tinderbox, which also have some really interesting old-school hypertext mechanisms.

Outlinersoftware.com is a good forum for people who tread these links - they even have a term for those addicted to knowledge management tools, CRIMPers.
posted by davemee at 10:02 PM on May 27, 2020 [3 favorites]

Zengargoyle, that wasn’t Storyspace, was it? Storyspace is still produced by Eastgate and it’s bigger sibling Tinderbox is even wilder. Cards, nested hierarchies, inheritable prototypes for notes?
posted by davemee at 10:09 PM on May 27, 2020

Anonymous Function, thank you for the link to the Obsidian beta! I have downloaded it and am very excited.

Obsidian appears to be the external brain prosthetic I've been missing all these years (slash wasn't dedicated enough to implement with a tangle of notecards and txt files...).
posted by cnidaria at 10:16 PM on May 27, 2020

I watched one of the videos and a young man was excitedly describing the basic concepts of a wiki
posted by BinaryApe at 10:27 PM on May 27, 2020 [7 favorites]

I'm in the beta and I don't understand all the excitement.

Loading is slow, which makes it hard to turn it into a tool of habit.
I don't know where my data is.
It's janky on mobile, and that's still my primary device for jotting down quick notes. Which again makes it hard for it to become my go-to note taking tool.

I'm sure it pays off if you are ready to invest your time in it (to learn its intricacies and form the habit) but to me it's not instantly accessible enough to be valuable. I'm probably not the intended audience, although I am still looking for something like it.
posted by Captain Fetid at 10:43 PM on May 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

Correct me if I'm wrong but this app looks exactly like Workflowy?

Workflowy + hyperlinks (internal & external) + connection map + search features.

which are pretty much the gaps I noticed in Workflowy, so this looks great. Not an all-purpose tool, but very good for its niche.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 11:08 PM on May 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

Notice that people on Twitter are also comparing it to qualitative data analysis software like Quirkos, but not sure it really has the same functionality after 'tagging'. I guess these tools can be used for notetaking too
posted by danfreak at 1:15 AM on May 28, 2020

Wait, wait, wait...

"profound ... mental prosthetic"
"write 3x more daily content"
" daily auto-back-linked-wiki interconnected brain dumps"
"frictionless yet cohesive"

This isn't a Look Around You style satire site? This... is a real product?
posted by milkb0at at 2:50 AM on May 28, 2020 [8 favorites]

That waitlist form is.... something.
posted by schmod at 6:39 AM on May 28, 2020 [3 favorites]

The links are bi-directional, which is cool. But, imo, the killer feature is that every list item on every page has a unique ID and can be directly addressed or embedded. I switched to using it a couple month ago as my daily note-taking driver. I came from Workflowy. Workflowy is great. Roam is a bit different and better fits the way I think. It'll be interesting to see what happens as they grow and start taking money.
posted by tayknight at 7:57 AM on May 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

Obsidian looks great. Thanks for the heads-up, Anonymous Function.
posted by Kikkoman at 8:21 AM on May 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

I tried it a few weeks ago and apparently just didn't get it. How is it not just a personal wiki?

TiddlyWiki is still a thing in this timeline, right?
posted by a complicated history at 8:22 AM on May 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

I'm just trying to replace Google Docs with this because I like using tabs to indent my notes so this feels cleaner. I find the linking to other pages or search bar faster than Docs so that's been good enough for me. Oh yeah, code snipets is what won me over with using this for note taking.

The way #RoamCult is, makes me feel like I don't deserve the beta though.
posted by RichAndCreamy at 9:46 AM on May 28, 2020

I've been using it for a month or two and it was good, but now it crashes every time I log in and I can't get my data back out again. There are no support channels that seem to work. So ... as always, be cautious with beta tools that purport to centralize your life. I'm out a few months of daily notes.
posted by heresiarch at 10:12 AM on May 28, 2020

Obsidian works on all local MD files not cloud, so if the cloud aspect is an issue for you then there ya go.

Still, Obsidian very much feels like it is in beta. Perhaps a little underbaked.
posted by lazaruslong at 10:31 AM on May 28, 2020

I'm also stalking the topic for a while now - just like Anonymus Function - so here's my dump about Zettelkasten and related topics:
Note-taking techniques I: The index card method
The Zettelkasten Method
One Thought Per Note
Interview with Lion Kimbro
Lion Kimbro: How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think (pdf)
How To Take Smart Notes: 10 Principles to Revolutionize Your Note-Taking and Writing
How to take smart notes (Ahrens, 2017)
Zettelkasten — How One German Scholar Was So Freakishly Productive

I'm trying to change my established org-mode workflow to accomodate org-roam.

The two major advantages I see compared to vanilla org-mode are (1) bidirectional links and the ability to (2) easily link based on relationships instead of trying to fit nodes into hierarchies. You can do both with org-mode itself but it's very laborious, which explains why I always failed to do it.

As with everything in emacs, there's an upfront investment but based on previous successes (eg.: email in emacs - woohoo) I think it'll pay off. Maybe I'm going to start tomorrow, by adding all the above notes on note-taking.
posted by kmt at 10:31 AM on May 28, 2020 [10 favorites]

One thing I've noticed is that users of these knowledge bases are very good at producing dense non-fiction writing: take your notes, look at the graph of connections, decide on the order you want to present concepts in. Then paste the notes into the outline, add some connecting language, and you're done!

I'd love to be able to pull mostly baked work out of the "oven" of a personal knowledge base. However:

I'm not a writer. I might be able to pull stuff together and make proposals or presentations or blog posts, but that's a minority of my work.

The content generated this way seems to vary immensely in quality. In particular, I found How to Take Smart Notes dense and mostly useless. It was a dump of references after a brief description of "put cards in a (maybe digital?) box" as a note taking strategy.

I'm not a German-speaking academic, and I can't judge the quality of Luhmann's work. However, it does seem to me that you're optimizing for sheer output volume with these methods. Quantity can be a quality all its own, but it seems like targeting the wrong metric.

I still follow all the chatter here because the promise of systems like this is incredibly appealing. Recite the right rituals, follow the forms, do the incantations... and build some exo-brain which makes my professional (personal?) life less of a mess.
posted by Anonymous Function at 11:50 AM on May 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

thanks, ktm. that last link in your linkdump is especially helpful.
posted by lazaruslong at 1:04 PM on May 28, 2020

Text files, JPG files, PNG files. No matter what happens to your Zim install or to Zim the institution, your data, and even quite a lot of its structure, is still accessible.

am i bad for having all my notes and text in Notepad++ tabs
posted by Evilspork at 3:03 PM on May 28, 2020

does Roam let me use git to manage my notes? I don't do anything that doesn't go in git.
posted by lastobelus at 9:33 PM on May 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

Some very slight, vaguely remembered context on Luhmann:

As an undergrad, I took a seminar on Systems Theory which focused specifically on the works of Niklas Luhmann and his inspirations. (I was the only undergrad and the only person with an applied major). I remember 3 hours weekly of very lofty thoughts and ideas and some really amazing metaphors (it was my first time hearing the expression "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" and learning of the Ship of Theseus). Each week, I would leave the seminar at 9PM feeling like I had not understood a single thing, but with my head sparking and full of ideas. Luhmann's breadth was impressive, and it was unclear whether his work was brilliance or gibberish. At the end I was very glad that I had taken the course pass/fail.
posted by taltalim at 5:56 PM on May 29, 2020 [2 favorites]

Notebooks :P
posted by kliuless at 12:43 AM on May 30, 2020

I'm interested in the ideas here, but for my purposes a personal wiki is enough. I don't even want to create non-fiction books, I just like documenting things.

My goodness, the intro to that Lion Kimbra book! I hope it doesn't awaken something in me.

"So there we have it.
1. What this system will do to you. (EXPECT IT.)
2. The nonexistence (to date!) of an Internet study of Notebooks.
3. How I am spitting this text out.
4. The advantages of my system.
The Introduction is over."

posted by harriet vane at 8:47 AM on May 31, 2020

The two major advantages I see compared to vanilla org-mode are (1) bidirectional links and the ability to (2) easily link based on relationships instead of trying to fit nodes into hierarchies. You can do both with org-mode itself but it's very laborious, which explains why I always failed to do it.

Yup. There are times when I need emacs to behave a bit more like google keep on my laptop and my phone.

Plus, for me, I'd like to integrate images every once in a while. (I think Evernote does that?)
posted by sebastienbailard at 11:17 AM on June 1, 2020

Whatever happened to VoodooPad?

Honestly, having been burned before, I'm deeply suspicious of any such tool that doesn't have local text files as a storage mechanism.

Hence, for me: OrgMode in Emacs. My mobile solution is to ssh to a Linux box.
posted by uberchet at 2:04 PM on June 3, 2020 [1 favorite]