As I listened and agreed, I kept wanting to hit the "like" button--only to discover I already had. (RUclips needs to fix that so we can like it more than once. lol)
I had a teacher in university. He teached complexity science and all his clases were in diagrams and mental maps. I really enjoyed when I studied my notes that were his mental maps that he was building on the board as he teached. So I got used to take my notes in the same way. I was good a things like math and programing, but struggled with topics with a lot of concepts and information. But thanks to that I improved a lot.
I watched another RUclips video that spoke about writing mini essays to clarify thoughts. I feel that writing linearly prevents me from understanding. So I use mind maps for my mini essays where each node represents an aspect of the topic which I can organize and refine my thoughts around. I also prefer making graph diagrams where I label connections between ideas and see the entire system or network of ideas at a glance.
I think text and visuals serve different purposes. Text is dense and great to share specific information. In school it encourages kids to enhance their visualization skills as they try to understand a topic. However, as an adult with a desk job, I rarely write to think. Since real life is more open ended, insights and ideas often come to me by looking at random notes/ tables/ drawings I have made for a particular topic over time. I just stumbled across your channel and plan to watch more of your videos :) You have very unique content and I hope it spreads far and wide! Thanks for creating this.
Hey there! Just wanted to say I love your RUclips videos and appreciate all the work you put in. As a uni student in Australia, I totally get how our brains aren't linear, so being able to take notes directly on lecture PDFs has been a game-changer. Honestly, this is so much better than Notability, GoodNotes, or OneNote. The only thing I wish I could do is copy and paste text from my PDFs. I usually import them, not embed them, and even though you have awesome OCR, sometimes I just want to quickly grab a word or sentence. It's the one thing Notability and GoodNotes do that I miss here. Thanks again for making such great content!
Yes, that is a difficult one. I import PDF pages as images. This has benefits, but the consequence is that selecting text is not possible. You can CTRL+Click the PDF page, it should open in the built in Obsidian PDF viewer on the page, there you can select and copy text with reference. That is the workflow I follow.
Thank you. Interesting thoughts. Listened to you and realized I need some time to reflect on this. Also thought about the fact that sometimes when I want to do more complex visual details (like you have in BOP), but what stops me is that I haven't yet mastered how to create more complex images quickly and easily.
What I do not mention in the video, but is also an interesting / important aspect, is how creating visuals puts me in a relaxed, almost meditative state. It is not a fast process, but I find, I can entertain on a topic in my mind much longer when I am illustrating (doodling), then when I concentrate on trying to write summaries and conclusions. Every complex image is a series of simple small illustrations. It takes time. I haven't found a magic bullet that shortcuts the effort required to create meaningful visuals.
Thank you for this new video ! I was worried until you said : "I'm not against writing...I'm advocating for more visual thinking.. 😊 I do like visual thinking which is, I think, the bridge between words and pictures but we must be careful… picture not be worth 1000 words : I suggest one book's extract and one quotation to clarify my thought : "Language is an abstraction about experience , whereas pictures are concrete representations of experience . A picture may , indeed , be worth a thousand words , but it is in no sense the equivalent of a thousand words , or a hundred , or two . Words and pictures are different universes of discourse , for a word is always and foremost an idea , a figment , so to speak , of imagination . There does not exist in nature any such thing as “ cat ” or “ work ” or “ wine . ” Such words are concepts about the regularities we observe in nature . Pictures do not show concepts ; they show things . It cannot be said often enough that , unlike sentences , a picture is irrefutable . It does not put forward a proposition , it implies no opposite or negation of itself , there are no rules of evidence or logic to which it must conform . Thus , there is a sense in which pictures and other graphic images may be said to be “ cognitively regressive , at least in contrast to the printed word . The printed word requires of a reader an aggressive response to its “ truth content . ” One may not always be in a position to make that assessment but , in theory , the assessment can be made - if only one had enough knowledge or experience . But pictures require of the observer an aesthetic response . They call upon our emotions , not our reason . They ask us to feel , not to think . " - "The Disappearance of Childhood" - Neil Postman "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein
I love these quotes. Very insightful. Thanks for sharing! "Words and pictures are different universes of discourse" is a good way to put it. However, Postman's view seems somewhat narrow about pictures. What about diagrams, abstract art, or modeling languages?... Because indeed modeling, not just drawing illustrations has rules, has a grammar and just like any other language we are not born knowing how to speak it. One issue I find is how easy it is to produce something that resembles a flow chart or a systems diagram, but without the appropriate grammar, many of these illustrations are closer to gibberish than visual modeling. ...finally, to avoid any misunderstandings, I write several pages of assays, reports, reflections each day. I write a lot. I just don't understand how some disciplines - legal being at the top of my list - operate with practically zero visualizations. They miss out on the clarity and insight the other "universe" could provide.
Thank you Zsolt! As in all things I think a balance of great visuals and great clear writing is the best. A picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes a few words are worth hundreds of pictures. For example, my experience with following ikea assembly directions is abysmal. The pictures don’t convey key information such as the correct orientation of screw holes and screw sizes. If there was a sentence with each graphic telling me key mistakes to look out for my furniture assembly skills would be much improved. Similarly as an engineer I have been reluctant to use UML diagrams as they can be hard to follow and the text is so small when it’s even present as to make the diagrams useless to me. A table in excel often proves more valuable when links are included as a way to navigate the requirement tree - especially when reference links are included to powerpoint drawings. It’s the balance of writing and drawing that is so often missing in how we process information.
Thank you for your insightful comment! I completely understand your perspective. When developing the storyline, I debated how controversial or balanced to make my point and opted for a slight bias towards visuals to emphasize their value. I agree that text is hugely important for thinking and communication. My aim was to highlight that in some industries, such as legal texts, the balance is often too heavily tilted towards text. We are in agreement, a balance of clear visuals and concise text can indeed be the most effective way to convey information. Both forms of communication have their strengths, and the key is to integrate them in a way that complements and enhances understanding. Omitting either completely, as in the case of the Book From The Ground or the EU law on GDPR, can make the end result difficult to understand.
Einstein thought about problems without using language to do so. This idea comes from Jacques Hadamard's The Psychology of Invention in Mathematics, which includes a letter from Einstein to Hadamard in the appendix. The letter is long, and the main point is as follows, "I do not think that language plays any role in the structure of thinking. The element that plays a role in thinking is a certain self-generating, combining image. The combining game of this image - which predates the combining game of the logical structure consisting of language and symbols - is the essential feature of creative thinking."
Thanks for the video! I have a silly question. How can I write in paragraphs in Excalidraw? When I write, the text just keeps going in an infinite line.
Zoom in and drag the side of the text area. Once you change its horizontal size it will start to wrap text. the other option is to add a sticky note... which is essentially a shape like a rectangle, ellipse or diamond. Double click the shape and start to type. Your text will wrap to the width of the shape.
in school we are taught to "stay within the lines" when drawing, we learn to write on a line. This stifles any imagination and thinking "freely". There is probably more information in doodles an a page than in the writing.
Your reference to doodles reminds me of some ideas I took away from Annie Murphy Paul's book, The Extended Mind. She argues that often as we start to draw, our hands create connections and references we weren't consciously aware of until we drew it. Illustrating ideas is a way to create external loops for our thinking.
Dear Zsolt! I think you just showed me my dream personal knowledment system! I want to ask your opinion on starting a new obsidian vault. Im a resident with a virtually endless things to put in my vault. What is your suggestion to orgainise the base and folders to make a good foundation to easily build on? Medicine is fairly strickt so I have an idea myself but I don’t know how to represent it. I thought to make an exclaridraw base mindmap ( organ systems -> ie: Cardiovascular and from there childred topics Anatomy/Phisiology/Patology/Examination/Treatment/Outcomes for every system. Or should I make this but not in one picture but wiht links? Or have you an idea to make it in an entierly different way? Thank you in forvard Dávid
While this is not a direct answer to your question, it will hopefully provide you some pointers... ruclips.net/video/nJ660t5ku9A/видео.html and ruclips.net/video/AtdAAD47aQY/видео.html
I've transitioned my daily notes page to Excalidraw a few months ago.. On the page I have various back-of-the-note card, plus Markdown embeds from sections of documents that I am working on that given day. I find this spatial organization of items I am working on more helpful and engaging than the linear (top to bottom) markdown document based DNP I was using for years. I've also been doing a daily note illustration practice for roughly 1.5 years now. My daily reflection involves creating a daily visual for a random quote. You can see a collection of some of these visuals here: ruclips.net/video/_luk7Ci2HDQ/видео.html
@@VisualPKM I would love to see how you use "various back of the card” (multiple?) on a routine note like daily & weekly reviews and task lists and goal alignment. I would assume something like GTD reviews could be a visual endeavor. (video request)
This is a question best to ask on the Obsidian Members Group Discord server in the Obsidian Publish channel: discord.com/channels/686053708261228577/768134314864017429
You want the icon library page to open in dark mode? you can achieve this in plugin settings under "Excalidraw appearance and behavior", or you can add a YAML property to the icon library script "excalidraw-export-dark: true" and the page will open in dark mode.
@@brianlt1668 I am not sure what you mean by "a specific color". Essentially you can do whatever automation and transformation using the YAML frontmatter "excalidraw-onload-script: ". You can access the color master library via ea.getCM("")... but this requires scripting
I am a reaearcher, linguist, and translator - my industry us dominatated by text. I wish that we had more visuals in what we do. However, I find that many of the concepts we work with regularly overlap in dozens of ways. The tremendous amount of overlap between some concepts, and the highly non-visible nature of others, makes generating visuals quite difficult sometimes.
We might need to define "visuals". In my mind visuals are not limited to illustrations or pictures, but also include concept models and other visual modeling methods that help decompose ideas and visualize the relationships. Modelling ideas will not solve world hunger, it is not a magic tool, but I believe that one reason why we have so complex overlaps between concepts is because people have not taken the time to visually model them. They just used language, which is a more forgiving and lose tool to define relations between concepts.
@@VisualPKM I thought for several days about this issue after making my original post. I actually think that many concepts in linguistics could be presented much more efficiently if we used diagrams consistently and would like to work toward that in my own presentation of material.
@@joshfrost851 consistency is the big differentiator. One of the key differences between just an illustration and modeling is how modeling is based on a modeling language. The language comes with standard notations and standardized relationships and grammatical rules, etc. The modeling language must be learned just like any other language.
I would pont out that in the way I generally use the term I consider graphs, tables, and spatial thinking in general all forms of visual thinking. i.e not just thinking in pictures. Especially spatial thinking is very powerful and very different from pure textual thinking (essentially nowadays when with digital books we have lost the spatial nature of physical books).
I trust what you are saying, but I am struggling with applying this to things I take notes about… This is I think related to another issue I am having: how to make my notes atomic. I am studying philosophy and find that the ideas I am trying to capture require lengthy continuous textual notes. I have recently wondered if this is because I am creating reading notes, not zettels? I feel that I need to reset my obsidian note taking approach but am stuck due to the above. Does anyone resonate with this or have any tips?
I proceed on two levels, first I take my notes in text, summarizing the main concepts. Then using that summary I proceed to make a visual diagram. If I have difficulties in doing so, it usually means that I didn't finish understanding something, so I go back to the summary to contrast my understanding, and what is missing from it, that prevents me from making the "click" of understanding. It is an iterative process. The final test is to be able, using only the visual diagram, to explain in a coherent way all the content.
Have you experimented with tools like IBIS Dialog Mapping (ruclips.net/video/q1r-_Df-Q34/видео.html), Concept Mapping (ruclips.net/video/Zg_DUj68VkY/видео.html), or Argdown (argdown.org/)?
@brian2007tube The first diagram of this video Rethink Wring is Courtney Applewhite's textual approach to use Obsidian. Watch this video on youtube. Zsolt advised you to use software, that can structure your long textual notes. Zsolt forgot to mention the shorts of his Heylre diagrams to study texts. Look-up the double bubble and you will find them. Childish, but effective! Cheers :)
I have also struggled with this question before so I'll share what worked for me. Instead of thinking in the size of the note I started focusing on the idea/Concept itself. Anytime I find myself taking notes about long walls of text I pause and ask myself whether taking notes for this part of the text out of context would really make sense for me (Here the me is very important). If I think it makes sense even without context then I make a separate note otherwise I don't.
Correction previous comment @brian2007tube The first diagram of this video Rethink Writing is Courtney Applewhite's textual approach to use Obsidian. Watch this video on RUclips; director Keep Productive. Zsolt advised you to use software, that can structure your long textual notes. Zsolt forgot to mention the shorts of his Hyelre diagrams to study texts. Look-up the double bubble and you will find them. Childish, but effective!
Wow! Thank you. I am flipping through the book right now. This will require an in-depth read. Very insightful. This comment alone made it worth the effort putting in the effort to create this video.
@@VisualPKM I am really glad you like it. Of the three- Tufte, Scott McCloud, and Robert Horn- I always thought Robert Horn was the most interesting, but also the least known. He also had a vision and even a roadmap for the development of computer-assisted generated visual language, and I remember thinking “the computer technology required to do this is at least a hundred years away.” But now with machine learning technologies here, I think the things he had at the far end of his roadmap are readily available.
I am an X amount of kilometers away from you, yet I want to send you message. How do I do that? I write to you this comment. Supposedly I am in front of you and I want to address to you another message. How do I do that? I speak to you. Both writing and speaking use words that are part of language, a set of rules over a set of intentional and well articulated sounds. Most of the times we use language (verbal and written) to communicate, to share messages. However, there are indeed moments when a song or a picture or a body gesture sends a richer and quicker message. And not everyone understands the same message from the same piece of art (thus we say art is subjective). Christian Orthodox churches are full of icons of saints, angels, events from the Bible, and representations of Jesus Christ. They tell a lot by just existing and being perceived by the crowd. The story unfolds in the minds of the crowd then, as long as they have heard/read the stories at least once. This experience is re-triggered in one's mind PROVIDED THAT one has received the message in verbal or written form at least once. The alternative would have been to witness the Biblical events first hand, which of course is not possible. This is why I advocate for using primarily language as tool that helps me understand or experience things that are not easily accessible to me.
this is poorly thought out. HOW WOULD A LEGAL DOCUMENT BE VISUAL???? everything about law is necessarily ABSTRACT. it's not arbitrary that it's written language and not comic book or diagram form.
I don't recommend visualizing legal documents comic book style. Visual thinking is not only about pictures and illustrations. Diagramming such as creating concept maps, domain models, process flows, etc. are also visual tools, and legal text would greatly benefit from including such representations. When you read a regulation or contract you will construct a model in your head of what is being explained. This would be greatly helped if there were visual references people could use to validate their mental models against. However, from your comment I understand that you don't see how abstract concepts can be visualized with modelling languages. I recommend researching topics such as UML, OPM, ArgDown, Concept Modelling to see how abstract concepts can be organized into meaningful visual representations. BTW - I do not advocate UML for legal text, it is just a very common example to show how complex topics can be visualized.
@@VisualPKM i think the example really matters. can you honestly say that you can conceive of a diagrammed form for a legal document (say even a terms of use page that you get at the beginning of a software install) that would be at all tenable and not like twenty times longer than the written version? i'm not familiar with the topics you cite but i'm familiar enough with stuff like flowcharts and mind mapping to know that there are really important limitations and domains where visualizing would be massively counterproductive. and i can think of no finer example of that than legal documents or something like a book of law. you've seen the gigantic shelves of law books that lawyers have right? an attempt to visualize all that information would explode the amount of books necessary to contain that information and simply because of space and pages, may make the ability to find information much harder.
@@jinchoung I am not advocating against writing, but I am advocating for visualizing. I personally do not think that it is helpful that a legal regulation such as the EU GDPR as shown in the video contains ZERO illustrations in the course of 100 pages of text. I personally find legal text extremely hard to understand... and while that might be because I am far below average intelligence, it could also be because it is communicated poorly. BTW, I assume others find it difficult as well, else there wouldn't be a huge industry built around interpreting, updating and tweaking laws all the time. I understand that life is ambiguous and thus legal regulations are as well, however, I also believe that the severe lack of proper modeling and illustration of these texts also plays a big role. My reference is in system design. I wonder, for example, how a building would be constructed if only paragraphs of text were provided to the construction company. Everything can be described precisely using words only - or not? Legal regulations are used to construct an abstract frameworks much like the physical framework of a building, only the bricks are different. If for construction a notation could be developed, I don't see why the same cannot be done for legal text... Thus I disagree. I actually believe that you could drastically reduce the number of pages if you used proper models and visual representations instead of solely relying on text as the only means of communication.
@@VisualPKM for me, I see the construction of a physical building to be the precise kind of task that's amenable to visual representation. it is physical, not abstract. same with geography and maps. it's, in my mind, the polar opposite of the abstractness of law with the tremendous amount of minute yet substantial detail contained in those words... even in the placement of commas. if you believe you (or anyone) could turn a dense page of legalese into a visual diagram of somesort that is more concise and more understandable without introducing greater room for ambiguity and imprecision, that is something that I would like to see.
Not true. Visual is overrated. That is becos our mind thinks visually but external modes cannot mimic that level of speed flexibility and generalization. Hence writing was invented as a stop gap arrangement. So dont mislead pls
Thank you for sharing your perspective. Writing was invented primarily to record economic transactions and administrative details, helping to manage increasingly complex societies. This is supported by archaeological evidence from ancient Mesopotamia, where early writing, such as cuneiform, documented trade and inventory records (Schmandt-Besserat, “How Writing Came About”). I agree that writing is indispensable for tasks like maintaining inventory or calculating costs versus revenue. However, my argument isn’t against writing but against the neglect of visualizations. From an IT Architecture perspective, textual requirements are often ambiguous without supporting diagrams and visuals. Over my 25+ years of experience, I’ve rarely seen clear requirements without visual aids. Diagrams like process flows, domain models, and use case diagrams add significant clarity to lengthy textual discussions. It’s concerning that legal texts, such as the EU GDPR Regulation as shown in the video, lack visual elements despite their complexity. Visual models, like concept maps, enhance understanding and should complement, not replace, textual information.
As I listened and agreed, I kept wanting to hit the "like" button--only to discover I already had. (RUclips needs to fix that so we can like it more than once. lol)
Thanks for the support!
Right! Ten thumbs up!
I agree this also happens to me. RUclips definitely needs to support unlimited likes
I had a teacher in university. He teached complexity science and all his clases were in diagrams and mental maps. I really enjoyed when I studied my notes that were his mental maps that he was building on the board as he teached. So I got used to take my notes in the same way. I was good a things like math and programing, but struggled with topics with a lot of concepts and information. But thanks to that I improved a lot.
I watched another RUclips video that spoke about writing mini essays to clarify thoughts. I feel that writing linearly prevents me from understanding. So I use mind maps for my mini essays where each node represents an aspect of the topic which I can organize and refine my thoughts around. I also prefer making graph diagrams where I label connections between ideas and see the entire system or network of ideas at a glance.
Wow, this is so true. This is so profound. Thank you
I completely agree!
I think text and visuals serve different purposes. Text is dense and great to share specific information. In school it encourages kids to enhance their visualization skills as they try to understand a topic. However, as an adult with a desk job, I rarely write to think. Since real life is more open ended, insights and ideas often come to me by looking at random notes/ tables/ drawings I have made for a particular topic over time.
I just stumbled across your channel and plan to watch more of your videos :) You have very unique content and I hope it spreads far and wide! Thanks for creating this.
i agree these act as ancors to the story(a paragraph of text). If you know the concept just looking at that visual image is enugh
Beautiful
spot on
Hey there! Just wanted to say I love your RUclips videos and appreciate all the work you put in. As a uni student in Australia, I totally get how our brains aren't linear, so being able to take notes directly on lecture PDFs has been a game-changer.
Honestly, this is so much better than Notability, GoodNotes, or OneNote. The only thing I wish I could do is copy and paste text from my PDFs. I usually import them, not embed them, and even though you have awesome OCR, sometimes I just want to quickly grab a word or sentence. It's the one thing Notability and GoodNotes do that I miss here.
Thanks again for making such great content!
Yes, that is a difficult one. I import PDF pages as images. This has benefits, but the consequence is that selecting text is not possible. You can CTRL+Click the PDF page, it should open in the built in Obsidian PDF viewer on the page, there you can select and copy text with reference. That is the workflow I follow.
Thank you. Interesting thoughts. Listened to you and realized I need some time to reflect on this.
Also thought about the fact that sometimes when I want to do more complex visual details (like you have in BOP), but what stops me is that I haven't yet mastered how to create more complex images quickly and easily.
What I do not mention in the video, but is also an interesting / important aspect, is how creating visuals puts me in a relaxed, almost meditative state. It is not a fast process, but I find, I can entertain on a topic in my mind much longer when I am illustrating (doodling), then when I concentrate on trying to write summaries and conclusions.
Every complex image is a series of simple small illustrations. It takes time. I haven't found a magic bullet that shortcuts the effort required to create meaningful visuals.
Thank you for this new video !
I was worried until you said : "I'm not against writing...I'm advocating for more visual thinking.. 😊
I do like visual thinking which is, I think, the bridge between words and pictures but we must be careful… picture not be worth 1000 words : I suggest one book's extract and one quotation to clarify my thought :
"Language is an abstraction about experience , whereas pictures are concrete representations of experience . A picture may , indeed , be worth a thousand words , but it is in no sense the equivalent of a thousand words , or a hundred , or two . Words and pictures are different universes of discourse , for a word is always and foremost an idea , a figment , so to speak , of imagination . There does not exist in nature any such thing as “ cat ” or “ work ” or “ wine . ”
Such words are concepts about the regularities we observe in nature . Pictures do not show concepts ; they show things . It cannot be said often enough that , unlike sentences , a picture is irrefutable . It does not put forward a proposition , it implies no opposite or negation of itself , there are no rules of evidence or logic to which it must conform .
Thus , there is a sense in which pictures and other graphic images may be said to be “ cognitively regressive , at least in contrast to the printed word .
The printed word requires of a reader an aggressive response to its “ truth content . ” One may not always be in a position to make that assessment but , in theory , the assessment can be made - if only one had enough knowledge or experience . But pictures require of the observer an aesthetic response . They call upon our emotions , not our reason . They ask us to feel , not to think . " - "The Disappearance of Childhood" - Neil Postman
"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein
I love these quotes. Very insightful. Thanks for sharing!
"Words and pictures are different universes of discourse" is a good way to put it.
However, Postman's view seems somewhat narrow about pictures. What about diagrams, abstract art, or modeling languages?... Because indeed modeling, not just drawing illustrations has rules, has a grammar and just like any other language we are not born knowing how to speak it. One issue I find is how easy it is to produce something that resembles a flow chart or a systems diagram, but without the appropriate grammar, many of these illustrations are closer to gibberish than visual modeling.
...finally, to avoid any misunderstandings, I write several pages of assays, reports, reflections each day. I write a lot. I just don't understand how some disciplines - legal being at the top of my list - operate with practically zero visualizations. They miss out on the clarity and insight the other "universe" could provide.
perfect
Thank you Zsolt! As in all things I think a balance of great visuals and great clear writing is the best. A picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes a few words are worth hundreds of pictures. For example, my experience with following ikea assembly directions is abysmal. The pictures don’t convey key information such as the correct orientation of screw holes and screw sizes. If there was a sentence with each graphic telling me key mistakes to look out for my furniture assembly skills would be much improved. Similarly as an engineer I have been reluctant to use UML diagrams as they can be hard to follow and the text is so small when it’s even present as to make the diagrams useless to me. A table in excel often proves more valuable when links are included as a way to navigate the requirement tree - especially when reference links are included to powerpoint drawings. It’s the balance of writing and drawing that is so often missing in how we process information.
Thank you for your insightful comment! I completely understand your perspective. When developing the storyline, I debated how controversial or balanced to make my point and opted for a slight bias towards visuals to emphasize their value. I agree that text is hugely important for thinking and communication. My aim was to highlight that in some industries, such as legal texts, the balance is often too heavily tilted towards text.
We are in agreement, a balance of clear visuals and concise text can indeed be the most effective way to convey information. Both forms of communication have their strengths, and the key is to integrate them in a way that complements and enhances understanding. Omitting either completely, as in the case of the Book From The Ground or the EU law on GDPR, can make the end result difficult to understand.
Einstein thought about problems without using language to do so. This idea comes from Jacques Hadamard's The Psychology of Invention in Mathematics, which includes a letter from Einstein to Hadamard in the appendix.
The letter is long, and the main point is as follows, "I do not think that language plays any role in the structure of thinking. The element that plays a role in thinking is a certain self-generating, combining image. The combining game of this image - which predates the combining game of the logical structure consisting of language and symbols - is the essential feature of creative thinking."
Thanks for the video! I have a silly question. How can I write in paragraphs in Excalidraw? When I write, the text just keeps going in an infinite line.
Zoom in and drag the side of the text area. Once you change its horizontal size it will start to wrap text.
the other option is to add a sticky note... which is essentially a shape like a rectangle, ellipse or diamond. Double click the shape and start to type. Your text will wrap to the width of the shape.
in school we are taught to "stay within the lines" when drawing, we learn to write on a line. This stifles any imagination and thinking "freely". There is probably more information in doodles an a page than in the writing.
Your reference to doodles reminds me of some ideas I took away from Annie Murphy Paul's book, The Extended Mind. She argues that often as we start to draw, our hands create connections and references we weren't consciously aware of until we drew it. Illustrating ideas is a way to create external loops for our thinking.
Dear Zsolt!
I think you just showed me my dream personal knowledment system! I want to ask your opinion on starting a new obsidian vault. Im a resident with a virtually endless things to put in my vault. What is your suggestion to orgainise the base and folders to make a good foundation to easily build on? Medicine is fairly strickt so I have an idea myself but I don’t know how to represent it. I thought to make an exclaridraw base mindmap ( organ systems -> ie: Cardiovascular and from there childred topics Anatomy/Phisiology/Patology/Examination/Treatment/Outcomes for every system. Or should I make this but not in one picture but wiht links? Or have you an idea to make it in an entierly different way? Thank you in forvard
Dávid
While this is not a direct answer to your question, it will hopefully provide you some pointers... ruclips.net/video/nJ660t5ku9A/видео.html and ruclips.net/video/AtdAAD47aQY/видео.html
Thank you!
This makes sense for projects. Do you daily and weekly Journaling with Excalidraw visuals? Do you use the MD side of the note?
I've transitioned my daily notes page to Excalidraw a few months ago.. On the page I have various back-of-the-note card, plus Markdown embeds from sections of documents that I am working on that given day. I find this spatial organization of items I am working on more helpful and engaging than the linear (top to bottom) markdown document based DNP I was using for years. I've also been doing a daily note illustration practice for roughly 1.5 years now. My daily reflection involves creating a daily visual for a random quote. You can see a collection of some of these visuals here: ruclips.net/video/_luk7Ci2HDQ/видео.html
@@VisualPKM I would love to see how you use "various back of the card” (multiple?) on a routine note like daily & weekly reviews and task lists and goal alignment. I would assume something like GTD reviews could be a visual endeavor. (video request)
Sorry if i buy obsidian plus can i have my own domain and add ads? Earning on that?
This is a question best to ask on the Obsidian Members Group Discord server in the Obsidian Publish channel: discord.com/channels/686053708261228577/768134314864017429
Please add the possibility to export excalidraw as a file pdf not just png pls.
Hi! I'm new with excalidraw and I configured the icon library. Any way to automatically set "invert colors" option ? Sorry if it's out of topic-
You want the icon library page to open in dark mode? you can achieve this in plugin settings under "Excalidraw appearance and behavior", or you can add a YAML property to the icon library script "excalidraw-export-dark: true" and the page will open in dark mode.
@@VisualPKM oh, nice! and what about an specific color? thanks for your time and job !
@@brianlt1668 I am not sure what you mean by "a specific color". Essentially you can do whatever automation and transformation using the YAML frontmatter "excalidraw-onload-script: ". You can access the color master library via ea.getCM("")... but this requires scripting
I am a reaearcher, linguist, and translator - my industry us dominatated by text.
I wish that we had more visuals in what we do. However, I find that many of the concepts we work with regularly overlap in dozens of ways. The tremendous amount of overlap between some concepts, and the highly non-visible nature of others, makes generating visuals quite difficult sometimes.
We might need to define "visuals". In my mind visuals are not limited to illustrations or pictures, but also include concept models and other visual modeling methods that help decompose ideas and visualize the relationships. Modelling ideas will not solve world hunger, it is not a magic tool, but I believe that one reason why we have so complex overlaps between concepts is because people have not taken the time to visually model them. They just used language, which is a more forgiving and lose tool to define relations between concepts.
@@VisualPKM I thought for several days about this issue after making my original post. I actually think that many concepts in linguistics could be presented much more efficiently if we used diagrams consistently and would like to work toward that in my own presentation of material.
@@joshfrost851 consistency is the big differentiator. One of the key differences between just an illustration and modeling is how modeling is based on a modeling language. The language comes with standard notations and standardized relationships and grammatical rules, etc. The modeling language must be learned just like any other language.
I wish my brain worked like that. Aphantasia is a bitch, but this would be a cool technique
I would pont out that in the way I generally use the term I consider graphs, tables, and spatial thinking in general all forms of visual thinking. i.e not just thinking in pictures. Especially spatial thinking is very powerful and very different from pure textual thinking (essentially nowadays when with digital books we have lost the spatial nature of physical books).
I trust what you are saying, but I am struggling with applying this to things I take notes about… This is I think related to another issue I am having: how to make my notes atomic. I am studying philosophy and find that the ideas I am trying to capture require lengthy continuous textual notes. I have recently wondered if this is because I am creating reading notes, not zettels? I feel that I need to reset my obsidian note taking approach but am stuck due to the above. Does anyone resonate with this or have any tips?
I proceed on two levels, first I take my notes in text, summarizing the main concepts. Then using that summary I proceed to make a visual diagram. If I have difficulties in doing so, it usually means that I didn't finish understanding something, so I go back to the summary to contrast my understanding, and what is missing from it, that prevents me from making the "click" of understanding. It is an iterative process. The final test is to be able, using only the visual diagram, to explain in a coherent way all the content.
Have you experimented with tools like IBIS Dialog Mapping (ruclips.net/video/q1r-_Df-Q34/видео.html), Concept Mapping (ruclips.net/video/Zg_DUj68VkY/видео.html), or Argdown (argdown.org/)?
@brian2007tube The first diagram of this video Rethink Wring is Courtney Applewhite's textual approach to use Obsidian. Watch this video on youtube. Zsolt advised you to use software, that can structure your long textual notes. Zsolt forgot to mention the shorts of his Heylre diagrams to study texts. Look-up the double bubble and you will find them. Childish, but effective! Cheers :)
I have also struggled with this question before so I'll share what worked for me. Instead of thinking in the size of the note I started focusing on the idea/Concept itself. Anytime I find myself taking notes about long walls of text I pause and ask myself whether taking notes for this part of the text out of context would really make sense for me (Here the me is very important). If I think it makes sense even without context then I make a separate note otherwise I don't.
Correction previous comment
@brian2007tube The first diagram of this video Rethink Writing is Courtney Applewhite's textual approach to use Obsidian. Watch this video on RUclips; director Keep Productive. Zsolt advised you to use software, that can structure your long textual notes. Zsolt forgot to mention the shorts of his Hyelre diagrams to study texts. Look-up the double bubble and you will find them. Childish, but effective!
Robert Horn: Visual Language, Global Communication for the 21st Century
Wow! Thank you. I am flipping through the book right now. This will require an in-depth read. Very insightful.
This comment alone made it worth the effort putting in the effort to create this video.
@@VisualPKM I am really glad you like it. Of the three- Tufte, Scott McCloud, and Robert Horn- I always thought Robert Horn was the most interesting, but also the least known. He also had a vision and even a roadmap for the development of computer-assisted generated visual language, and I remember thinking “the computer technology required to do this is at least a hundred years away.” But now with machine learning technologies here, I think the things he had at the far end of his roadmap are readily available.
3:41 It's confusing talking about maps when you're clearly showing a list of directions and vice versa in this segment.
The contrast is deliberate, but I understand it can come across confusing.
I am an X amount of kilometers away from you, yet I want to send you message. How do I do that? I write to you this comment. Supposedly I am in front of you and I want to address to you another message. How do I do that? I speak to you. Both writing and speaking use words that are part of language, a set of rules over a set of intentional and well articulated sounds. Most of the times we use language (verbal and written) to communicate, to share messages. However, there are indeed moments when a song or a picture or a body gesture sends a richer and quicker message. And not everyone understands the same message from the same piece of art (thus we say art is subjective). Christian Orthodox churches are full of icons of saints, angels, events from the Bible, and representations of Jesus Christ. They tell a lot by just existing and being perceived by the crowd. The story unfolds in the minds of the crowd then, as long as they have heard/read the stories at least once. This experience is re-triggered in one's mind PROVIDED THAT one has received the message in verbal or written form at least once. The alternative would have been to witness the Biblical events first hand, which of course is not possible.
This is why I advocate for using primarily language as tool that helps me understand or experience things that are not easily accessible to me.
this is poorly thought out. HOW WOULD A LEGAL DOCUMENT BE VISUAL???? everything about law is necessarily ABSTRACT. it's not arbitrary that it's written language and not comic book or diagram form.
I don't recommend visualizing legal documents comic book style. Visual thinking is not only about pictures and illustrations. Diagramming such as creating concept maps, domain models, process flows, etc. are also visual tools, and legal text would greatly benefit from including such representations. When you read a regulation or contract you will construct a model in your head of what is being explained. This would be greatly helped if there were visual references people could use to validate their mental models against. However, from your comment I understand that you don't see how abstract concepts can be visualized with modelling languages. I recommend researching topics such as UML, OPM, ArgDown, Concept Modelling to see how abstract concepts can be organized into meaningful visual representations. BTW - I do not advocate UML for legal text, it is just a very common example to show how complex topics can be visualized.
@@VisualPKM i think the example really matters. can you honestly say that you can conceive of a diagrammed form for a legal document (say even a terms of use page that you get at the beginning of a software install) that would be at all tenable and not like twenty times longer than the written version? i'm not familiar with the topics you cite but i'm familiar enough with stuff like flowcharts and mind mapping to know that there are really important limitations and domains where visualizing would be massively counterproductive. and i can think of no finer example of that than legal documents or something like a book of law. you've seen the gigantic shelves of law books that lawyers have right? an attempt to visualize all that information would explode the amount of books necessary to contain that information and simply because of space and pages, may make the ability to find information much harder.
@@jinchoung I am not advocating against writing, but I am advocating for visualizing. I personally do not think that it is helpful that a legal regulation such as the EU GDPR as shown in the video contains ZERO illustrations in the course of 100 pages of text. I personally find legal text extremely hard to understand... and while that might be because I am far below average intelligence, it could also be because it is communicated poorly. BTW, I assume others find it difficult as well, else there wouldn't be a huge industry built around interpreting, updating and tweaking laws all the time.
I understand that life is ambiguous and thus legal regulations are as well, however, I also believe that the severe lack of proper modeling and illustration of these texts also plays a big role. My reference is in system design. I wonder, for example, how a building would be constructed if only paragraphs of text were provided to the construction company. Everything can be described precisely using words only - or not? Legal regulations are used to construct an abstract frameworks much like the physical framework of a building, only the bricks are different. If for construction a notation could be developed, I don't see why the same cannot be done for legal text... Thus I disagree. I actually believe that you could drastically reduce the number of pages if you used proper models and visual representations instead of solely relying on text as the only means of communication.
@@VisualPKM for me, I see the construction of a physical building to be the precise kind of task that's amenable to visual representation. it is physical, not abstract. same with geography and maps. it's, in my mind, the polar opposite of the abstractness of law with the tremendous amount of minute yet substantial detail contained in those words... even in the placement of commas.
if you believe you (or anyone) could turn a dense page of legalese into a visual diagram of somesort that is more concise and more understandable without introducing greater room for ambiguity and imprecision, that is something that I would like to see.
Not true. Visual is overrated. That is becos our mind thinks visually but external modes cannot mimic that level of speed flexibility and generalization. Hence writing was invented as a stop gap arrangement. So dont mislead pls
Thank you for sharing your perspective.
Writing was invented primarily to record economic transactions and administrative details, helping to manage increasingly complex societies. This is supported by archaeological evidence from ancient Mesopotamia, where early writing, such as cuneiform, documented trade and inventory records (Schmandt-Besserat, “How Writing Came About”). I agree that writing is indispensable for tasks like maintaining inventory or calculating costs versus revenue.
However, my argument isn’t against writing but against the neglect of visualizations. From an IT Architecture perspective, textual requirements are often ambiguous without supporting diagrams and visuals. Over my 25+ years of experience, I’ve rarely seen clear requirements without visual aids. Diagrams like process flows, domain models, and use case diagrams add significant clarity to lengthy textual discussions. It’s concerning that legal texts, such as the EU GDPR Regulation as shown in the video, lack visual elements despite their complexity. Visual models, like concept maps, enhance understanding and should complement, not replace, textual information.