Database

What is this?

This website contains a small (but growing) database consisting of short notes about topics related to my research and teaching. They link to one another, like this.

The notes you find here are selections from my personal knowledge base, built using Obsidian. I use Obsidian to keep my personal notes searchable, connected, and visualizable.

The database on this website is regularly being updated, as I write more notes and polish old ones into a shareable state.

Why is it here?

For three main reasons:

1. To make my own work more accessible to others. I hope you’ll find it useful if you want to know more about what I do but you don’t feel like reading a whole paper;
2. To share work in progress and work that would not otherwise have a home. Here you can learn more about things that I’m actively working on but haven’t reached the stage of a paper draft yet. You can also find notes about things that don’t (and perhaps never will) fit neatly in any of my paper projects;
3. To motivate myself. The goal of making more of my notes public pushes me to write regularly and take better notes for my own consumption.

How do I use it?

There are several ways of exploring the database:

1. Follow clickable internal links in the main text. You’ll find many of these across the website.
2. Use the graph view on the top right of the screen (desktop) or at the very end of the page (tablet & mobile).
   1. A local graph of the current page is always displayed, showing notes that can be reached from the current one by taking at most two steps through links;
   2. A global graph, showing all notes, can be accessed by clicking on the little graph icon at the top right of the local graph view;
3. Use the full text search function. A search bar located right below the graph, or you can press Ctrl+k;
4. Use backlinks. When you’re on a note that some other note links to, you can see a list of notes that link to the current note on the bottom right of the screen (desktop) or at the very bottom of the page (tablet & mobile). These links can be clicked like internal links in the main text.