Dear user,

Please feel free to delete both the contents of this knowledge base and the post below. The small set of examples in the knowledge base are included to provide a demonstration of how the knowledge base works in practice. The post below explains the theory behind the knowledge base’s design and can also be found here. For questions, feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] or on Twitter at @kaseyklimes.

*Sincerely,

Kasey Klimes*

An Augmented Mind: Designing a Knowledge Base with Notion

by Kasey Klimes

In 1945 Vannevar Bush proposed the Memex, a machine that would provide an "enlarged intimate supplement to one's memory" by compressing and storing all of one's books and records. Fast and flexible recall of information would be assisted by the interconnection of "associative trails". In effect, the organization of information in the machine would reflect the associative patterns of our own thought. As Bush argued,

"The human mind... operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature."

Despite the 75 years and countless innovations we've had since Bush's call, most information systems still don't reflect the mind's associative process. They enforce rigidly hierarchical information architectures, only support one-way links, and completely ignore the importance of the relationships between pieces of information. We are up to our necks in note-taking tools, but we lack thinking tools that help us make sense of that information.

As a researcher I find this especially frustrating. The tools at our disposal for making sense of avalanches of information are disappointing at best. Fortunately, Notion has come along and built a tool that enables some degree of thinking in the spirit of Bush's Memex.

This Notion block contains a template of my personal knowledge base. I think of it as a flexible framework for structuring insights into a network that allows me to easily explore the relationships between them and ultimately synthesize them into new ideas or a better understanding of the world. I consider it a secret weapon (that everyone should have)!

Why Notion?

Notion has a few unique capabilities that make it extremely well-suited for a knowledge base.

Two-Way Links

My knowledge base takes advantage of Notion's relational database functionality, which is super handy for knowledge bases because it reflects a basic characteristic of information that most other systems ignore: