erazlogo / obsidian-history-vault

A starter vault for historical research with Zotero and Obsidian.

This is a starter vault for historical research with Zotero and Obsidian. To download, click on the "Code" button on the Github page.

For directions on how to use this vault, go to Doing History with Zotero and Obsidian.

This vault will be updated frequently during the summer of 2023. To migrate to a newer version, just move your notes into matching folders in the new vault.

Advanced Features and Best Practices for Historians

• Combine free-form "Zettelkasten" linking of ideas with structured data necessary to know who did what and when.
• Import your PDF annotations from Zotero into Obsidian, including archive, archive-location, and recipient fields. This feature incorporates archival research, including private correspondence.
• Split the resulting "literature note" into atomic "research notes" that will be later sorted into groups for writing. Different annotations from the same source might belong in different places in your draft.
• Search and sort research notes by source metadata; by note title, creation date, and modification date; by date of event described in the note, your comments, tags, and by keyword (everything in the note and note title) in a familiar interface structured like a library catalog search.
• Trace social networks: create and link person, place, and event notes and visualize with the Graph view

Showcase of features available in this vault

Import your annotations from Zotero

The imported "literature note" includes Zotero item metadata, Zotero tags, and a predefined template for working with notes.

Extract an annotation as an atomic "research note"

Extract an annotation from your imported annotations file (literature note). The new note will include all source information and the template for working with notes. The script includes a prompt for setting new note title and places a link to the new note in your original annotations file.

Search and sort your notes by source fields

• Sort your research notes and literature notes by fields dynamically.
• Keyword search finds a word or phrase in the entire note text + note title.
• For text fields, this is a case-insensitive phrase search.
• Enter dates as YYYY-MM-DD, <YYYY-MM-DD and >YYYY-MM-DD.
• Enter tags as #tag1 #tag2.
• Enter exact field title and asc/desc to sort by field.
• Leave sort fields blank to sort by note-title, desc.

Acknowledgments

This vault's special features would have been impossible without these plugins:

• Zotero Integration
• Templater
• Dataview
• Kanban
• Longform

obsidian-history-vault's Issues

"Processing Imported Annotations" error

When trying to establish the "paste annotations to another note" workflow, it seems that there is a gap in the tutorial. The "templater.js" file is not found in the "templater" folder, or anywhere else in the vault.

Hence the error message that the templater.js file is not found, and the workflow is interrupted. Did I miss anything?

Anyway to extract the notes in the same highlight color to a new markdown file

Hi,

Thanks for the great tutorial. It helps so much for me to get into this zotero-obsidian world.

I like the idea that hangout of different annotations based on the highlight colors. It helps a lot to categorize different notes. Since we usually use similar color highlights for different papers. I feel it would be awesome if we can organize all the same highlight colors from different papers into a summary file. I try to do some research by myself. But it seems it is a bit too much for a starter like me right now. Could you give me a hand?

Thank you!

Invalid YAML

Hi Elena

Great template for the research note! However, there is a slight issue.
On my end, I can see that the YAML front in Obsidian is not rendered properly. In the reading mode, it is showing that the message "Invalid YAML". Is there a way to fix this issue?

Create Research Note Error

This workflow and vault draft is extremely helpful for my scholarship. Thank you for sharing it. I had an issue in trying to "Create Research Note". I get the error below:

Do others get this error? Any suggestions.

Adding tags field to YAML

Hello,

I have been really inspired by your Zotero/Obsidian workflow. However, I'm also really terrible at coding... For my workflow, I would really need to be able to add the tags from the Zotero object within the YAML field of the imported annotation. I have tried pasting your tags code within a tag field in the template (in the YAML frontmatter) but I always get a parsing error.
I attach a screen cap of the modifications I've attempted within the template, as well as the error message. I'm quite lost!
Thank you so much!

A small problem about the tags query

Hello, Elena

Thank you very much for your time on this project, it helped a lot, but I found a small problem.

The tags:: field of the file "meta/dataview/Search Research Notes.md" does not retrieve tags according to the content filled in, no matter what is filled in, the search results are all files under dv.pages('"folder"')

json problem

i just downloaded the starter vault but it will not import notes and says its because "unexpected end of JSON input", sorry if this is a stupid problem, i am very clueless

Problem with importing further highlights into same note