Annotations and maps of contents, distributed

I’ve been messing around with a new (to me, anyway) means of creating links between notes and files.

Certain other communities create maps of content when a body of notes gets large. The idea is you have a document that serves as a table of contents.

TheBrain supports “jump thoughts” which are sort of see-also links outside parent/child relationships.

There’s a way to provide similar functionality in Devonthink. It’s pretty obvious, really, it’s just yet one more thing in DT that I’d never noticed.

Annotations on files can have links. Yeah, not a forehead-slapper, but it never occurred to me I could make use of it.

The portion of a central map of content pertinent to a file can go in the annotation for that file. Links can be entered with the convenient “[[” notation, if you want.

If an older file pertains to a new note I’m just writing, I can put a link to the old file in the new file’s annotations. The old file will show that as a back link, so I don’t necessarily need to touch the old file. DT’s see also function apparently finds links in annotations, so relationships grow there, too.

Not exactly ground breaking stuff here, but perhaps some food for thought.

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Links can be entered with the convenient “[[” notation, if you want.

Referring to WikiLinks, in this case.

Yes - the revelation was that I could use annotations for context beyond just commentary on the parent document.

The annotations are regular Markdown or RTF documents in Devonthink.

They can carry tags separate from the document they annotate, too. I doubt I would often do that, but if an annotation on one file had more relevance to a tagged group than its parent document, why not?

The DTGraphView script is awesome, but imagine YAML frontmatter in either documents or annotations.

Imagine declaring a name, like “map: Chemistry Class”, with parent, children, and jumps defined with links.

Siblings would be discovered. A navigation map could be displayed that refocussed with each click, switching to that document in the main DT window. You could choose to view any map you named. Viewing Chemistry Class would show those relationships, Physics Class would show what you declared for your Physics class map.

Some of that can already be done in Obsidian with the Excalibrain plugin, but Excalibrain is not perfect. I found ways to confuse it and that drove me back to Devonthink.

If I can find the time, I think I feel a Python conduit coming on.

Thank @benoit.pointet for that. I only made minor modifications for easier deployment. :slight_smile:

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I should have looked up the credit. It’s really cool.