Documenting Your Research Thinking with Obsidian

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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.