How to work on an interview in Obsidian
This originated in a discussion on the Obsidian Discord server, and I thought it might be interesting for other folks as well.
The Question
I have a question about a particular form of work: interviews! I’ve been interviewing a bunch of primary sources for my topic, and i am looking to produce engaging edited interviews from this work as well as writing about these elements and referring back to the interviews. (I’m also performing an audio edit of the materials and will launch that.) this leaves me with both managing and trimming these primary sources and writing my own thoughts related to them. Obsidian seems like a great tool for this, but i keep muddling which set of approaches to take. For example, making an edit by transcluding selections from a full transcript. Or busting the transcript into atomic bits and linking then together. Any advice or places i could explore further will help!
The Rambling Answer
Here are my thoughts, and this is going to probably fly in the face of most of the other academic suggestions or to get – but that's how I work.
Do the bare minimum of work to accomplish the goal you want.
This is going to require you to figure out what it is you actually want to do with your annotations, your notes, whatever it is and additional material that you are going to have to write into the system and manage. You need to have a goal, an interest, a desire that will guide your hand.
From zettelkasten processes, I like to borrow heavily from the idea of atomicity; one idea or chunk of idea per node in the graph. I am largely explicitly against the idea of pre-building MOC's and preferred the idea of just building "hub nodes" which largely exist only to catch links but can, as you accumulate ideas, actually be content expanded themselves. And I like using the graph, particularly the local graph, to navigate and observe relationships.
So – for an interview – I would start by making a node for the interview itself and name it appropriately. That node would probably contain the author (which links off to a node), the main topics (each of which would be a node), the broadcast platform or intended platform (which would be a node), and if you have it easy at hand a transcript (which would probably live in the text of the interview node itself – but hold on).
That only gets you so far as ingesting the base text – and only if you have it. If you don't have it, that's fine. Put in a place where you can link to being able to listen to it or the downloaded file.
Now you can start thinking about what you're going to do with what you've got. You probably want to comment on sections/segments of the interview. If you have the transcript, go through and start making links to topics internally, each of which is a node. You might see phrases that pop out at you that might come up later either there or elsewhere, or that you want to talk about in specific. Make it a node. If you don't have the transcript, you can skip this step.
At long last, you're ready to start having some independent thoughts. You want to make this easy on yourself. You want to make the linking of your independent thoughts, which themselves live in nodes, easy to contextualize and block out. Again, atomicity. This is where you might go back into the transcript of the original interview and start re-factoring it, breaking it out into smaller chunks which may represent individual questions or portions of an answer of multiple paragraphs which belong together as a meaningfully referential chunk of data.
There is a great note re-factoring plug-in available from the community[1] which makes doing this process a lot less painful. You just highlight the section that you think needs to be in a new note, hit your "make re-factored note" button, and it replaces all that text with a link in the original node and opens a new note with just that information. Easy peasy. Ready to rock 'n' roll.
If you don't have the original transcript, build yourself a quick template that effectively inserts the name of the interview node as a link, writes a little line prefix so that you can put in what the offsets into the interview recording of interest are, and set you up to start writing your thoughts about any particular chunk of that discussion whatsoever. You'll find it easiest to put the offsets in the name of the file for easy lookup. Rinse and repeat.
E.g. a file named "NAME OF YOUR INTERVIEW (DATE) - 01-12-00 - 01-12-36":
**Interview:** [[NAME OF YOUR INTERVIEW (DATE)]]
**Timestamps:**
- *Beginning:* 01:12:00
- *End:* 01:12:36
(The specific times wouldn't be in the template itself.)
When you're done, you're going to have at least a two level and potentially deeper mesh of nodes which refer to ideas outside the interview itself, your ideas on the things that were said, and then maybe some nodes which you write later which reference one or more of your own thoughts, allowing you to build off of them while pulling in some of the insights you get by looking at the pattern of references out of the interview itself.
If you really want to get fancy – and you might, depending on how much work you like, you can restructure and re-factor the original interview slightly differently – such that you have a node for the question, and then a node for the answer which links to the question but does not include it in the text itself.
This is handy if you want to be able to refer to the text of the transcript by transclusion of the answer into other writing elsewhere. That way you don't have to worry about accidentally picking up the question.
The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
Also available in Obsidian proper in the Community plug-in interface. ↩