Symbioverse

In this first year of my PhD, I’ve been investing in a practice of reflexive note-taking, treating it as a form of research important for its anarchival quality of exploring ‘affective forces’ – those feelings which I, as the research practitioner, have about the world that are themselves forms of knowing and practice. Brian Massumi, in describing what an anarchive is and what it does, talks about this as a form of research-creation and a ‘process-making engine’, where that which is produced is not the end goal but ‘becomes the visible indexing of the process’s repeated taking-effect’. Very cool, and also lot to wrap one’s head around!

To experiment with this in a tangible way, I’ve been using an Obsidian vault as a system for writing, thinking and organising notes. In Knowledge Management circles, this kind of system is often described as “building a second brain”, where one of the biggest benefits one will experience is the impact that the practice of linking notes can have on your actual brain (Nick Milo calls this “linking your thinking”, others might call it a form of commonplacing). I’ll probably dedicate a fuller post to this in future, though I think there’s potential for another entire PhD on the wonders of building second brains – particularly for designers. No doubt someone else is on it! (not me, not me…!!! *pulls myself back to reality*).

Anyway, I thought it might be fun to share my journey with my vault and aim to post regular updates on how these links are forming, visually. As I continue to take notes, link ideas, meditate, allow different subjects to inform each other, it feels like I’m tending a new forest and allowing a self-sustaining ecology to take hold.

A timelapse from the Obsidian graph view of my vault, speed up x 4, showing the formation and connections of around 700 notes produced between October 2022 and July 2023. Red dots are personal journal entries and reflections, green and blue are study and practice notes, white are un-linked.