Obsidian Notebooking on D'Arcy Norman, PhD

Experimental Obsidian 3D Graph Renderer

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 13:05:56 -0600

I’ve been playing around with some ideas for visualizing the notes and connections in my Obsidian vault, and how to go beyond just producing pretty pictures and into something that might be useful to make sense of the whole thing. It’s not quite there yet, but it’s getting close. Vibecoding this with Claude Code has let me take some ideas I’ve had for years, and actually building a thing in a couple of hours.

on building an Obsidian Related Notes plugin using Google's Antigravity IDE

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 11:13:36 -0700

TL;DR:

I built an AI/LLM-powered “related notes” plugin for Obsidian. It seems to work, but who knows? There’s a video tour, and the code is in a GitHub repository.

I’ve been using Obsidian for a few years now, and have always wanted a good “Related Notes” plugin to help me find things that overlap with what I’m working on - based on the content itself, not metadata or links. Haven’t had any luck so I kind of gave up.

my Obsidian Today dashboard

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 11:35:42 +0000

Update: I’ve revised my Today dashboard since this was originally published. Claude helped me figure out how to combine a couple of the blocks and make it work much better.

I’ve been using a Canvas as a “dashboard” (the “Map” tab in the screenshot below - here’s a screenshot) to see lots of info quickly, and have had a separate “Tasks” dashboard note (the “Tasks” pinned tab in the screenshot) to view upcoming/overdue/urgent tasks. But that didn’t quite get at what I needed - a quick way to find (and re-find) notes that I’m actively working on.

obsidian network visualizing

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0600

I “vibecoded” a web utility for visualizing Obsidian note networks, using a hardware-accelerated D3.js chart that is different (better?) than the graph visualizer that’s built into Obsidian…

Displaying Hierarchical Lists of Files With Obsidian and Dataview

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Wed, 03 May 2023 15:17:39 -0600

In Obsidian, I use a folder of notes called “Collections”. Inside Collections are various folders that act as buckets of info, in a quasi-Zettelkasten notes-as-personal-wikipedia kind of thing.

My Collections currently include (in alphabetical order):

Articles
Committees
Ideas
Institutions
Organizations
People
Profiles
Topics
Vendors

Some of these have subfolders to organize notes into smaller buckets. For example, Topics is organized by folders for:

General Tech
Higher Education
Information Technologies
Learning Spaces
Learning Technologies
Misc
Pedagogy
Processes
TI Projects
UCalgary

The folders change and I add to them and reorganize as needed. I’ve only been using Obsidian for about 4 months now, so I figure things will continue to settle as I get deeper into it…

How I use Obsidian to Manage My Note-taking Workflow

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 21:18:21 -0600

Rambling blog post alert: there isn’t a simple, straightforward way to tell the story of how I use Obsidian. This is going to be a bit of a winding post as I start to describe my setup and workflow. And there will be gaps because a) I don’t have time to write an omnibus description of this and b) you don’t want to read that anyway. I’ve been meaning to write this for awhile, but kept getting stuck by the scale of what was needed. So, forget that, here’s a first and incomplete blog post to get it started…