Documenting Your Research Thinking with Obsidian

This workshop has now reached capacity. We hope you'll consider registering for our online version of this workshop, offered on Wednesday, October 22, 2025.

Research isn’t just about collecting sources or writing papers, there’s a crucial middle stage where ideas take shape: reading, reflecting, drafting, and making connections.

This workshop explores how to treat research notes as valuable data — information that deserves to be organized, preserved, and revisited. We’ll use Obsidian, a free, flexible, and local-first note-taking app, to show how you can build a system for documenting your research thinking in plain-text files that you fully control.

You’ll learn how to link ideas, structure your notes, and even sync your notes to GitHub for safe, long-term storage, all without needing any coding experience. This workshop is open to everyone, but will be of particular interest to graduate students, faculty, and staff.

Co-Sponsors: UCSB Graduate Division and the Graduate Student Resource Center.