History Department, Concordia University, Montreal
elena.razlogova[at]concordia.ca
Welcome to Doing History with Zotero and Obsidian! Learn more about the project, or read about the setup here in detail. You can also download a starter Obsidian history vault
Notetaking is an essential aspect of research and writing. Historians in particular take notes on a grand scale: they process hundreds or thousands of primary sources when writing a book. You may start with index cards and a corkboard. But once you get into a major historical project you may be overwhelmed with sources and connections, and a corkboard will not be enough. Digital tools become crucial at that stage.
I chose Zotero and Obsidian for digital notetaking because they are free at the entry level, and their paid features are not expensive. Both apps have large and active user communities that support their development so they are not likely to disappear. Finally, their data is portable: Zotero can export all its data as plain-text files, and Obsidian data is basically a folder (called a "vault" in the app) of text files written in markdown, a simple markup language that creates formatted text in a plain-text file. Obsidian features such the local Graph (a map of connections between notes) and Dataview (a plugin that structures the text in my notes so they can be queried like a database) help analyze the information I collect.
I use Zotero to import source metadata and annotate PDFs, and Obsidian to work with notes. A popular way to do that among Obsidian users is to create one "literature note" per source with all annotations. But, as the above chart (based on a research process slide by historian Zachary Schrag) shows, different annotations from the same source actually might belong in different places in your draft.
In order to make this work, I split annotations into several research notes that will be later sorted into groups for writing. I put them in the top folder in my Obsidian vault, "01 notes" and mark them up for further analysis. My research notes look like this (open in a new window for better view):
This note includes a title that summarizes the note (it doubles as the file name for the note), source information, text from the source, tags, Dataview fields I set up with data added by me, including my comments, and links to other notes (clickable text in blue reflected in the graph on the top left). Links between notes are a basic feature of Obsidian. They are created by encasing the title of the note in double square brackets: [[note title here]]. The "live preview" feature in Obsidian hides this formatting code for easier reading.
On the left you see my folder structure, recommended by the Obsidian community: seven folders for my research, and a "meta" folder. Starting each folder number with a leading "0" ensures correct sorting in case you have more than nine research folders in the root directory down the road. In the unnumbered "meta" folder, I save all supplementary files, including templates for importing and processing Zotero annotations. (It is important to keep different kinds of templates in separate subfolders, in order to specify these folders correctly in the Obsidian preferences.)
On the right you see the Graph view that allows me to browse linked notes and trace networks among people, events, institutions, and artworks. This is a key Obsidian feature allowing for Zettelkasten notetaking method. The backlinks feature (bottom right) lists all notes that link back to the current note.
Below I explain what you need to do to get to this point.
Note: Obsidian plugins can be easily installed from within Obsidian (see directions below). Here I provide links to Github repositories where you can find out more about them.
Zotero 6 and Zotero Browser Connector
Better Bibtex for Zotero - Zotero plugin
Zotero Integration (formerly Zotero Desktop Connector) - Obsidian plugin. If your Obsidian installer version is before v0.13.24 you will need to reinstall from obsidian.md website (rather than updating from within the app).