Gilded Ages Web

As promised, I started reviewing my notes on the Gilded Ages and loading them into Heptabase, where I hope to be able to create publishable “whiteboards” containing webs that link together all the families or businesses in whatever particular constellation I’m examining. I think this will be helpful in understanding how America operates. So I’m gradually adding notes that are extensively linked, based on a variety of connections. In this first pass, the connections were familial. I began with a 1988 book called Old Money: The Mythology of America's Upper Class, by Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., who is not really “Jr.” but IV (but as a friend reminded me, once the father is dead, the "Jr." can be amended). I figured I’d follow the links in this document and continue adding the connections from all the linked notes.

There were a lot of them! I got twenty-one done in this session. It’s a good start, although I wasn’t really able to add all the links. Some of them that I hadn’t added into the Obsidian vault, I went ahead and added here. Others I left with just the double-brackets that I use in Obsidian to signify and “empty node” that I need to go back and fill, sometime.

One of the cool things is that, in addition to the arrows I can draw, linking cards and describing the link (son, wife, brothers, etc.), all the backlinks I create by calling out another note with the “@” sign show up in the metadata about each note, when I examine it on the sidebar. That means if I want to briefly describe William Rockefeller’s family connections, for example, they’re all right there for me. When I add in his business connections, they’ll be there too. So I'll be able to click on any of those links to take me down the rabbit hole. I assume that means when I publish a whiteboard, my readers will be able to do the same. That approaches what I’m looking for in an app. So I’m satisfied with today’s experimenting. In case you want to examine the results, they're "published" here.

I’m also doing my morning daily notes in Heptabase now. Does that mean I’ve shifted over? I think there are still compelling reasons to use Obsidian, in addition to the sunk cost of all the stuff I’ve already put into it. But I also like the idea of reviewing my notes and upgrading them with metadata like tags that will make them more useful in mixing into new outputs. There's also something fun and rewarding, I've got to admit, watching a "whiteboard" fill with "cards".

I’m not seeking the ultimate in efficiency here. If anything, the “desirable difficulty” of doing a review as I shift ideas to a new platform, will help me develop them. This is another chance to massage these ideas and think about them as potential outputs of a thought process, rather than just books on a shelf in a big library.

Took about another hour and processed another source in my White Pine Lumber library. This one was a chapter from a book-length document called A Background Study for Nomination of the Ottawa River Under the Canadian Heritage Rivers System, published by Ottawa River Heritage Designation Committee in 2005. It included not only a good and well-referenced story of logging on the Ottawa River, but a bunch of images that I clipped out, to add to my whiteboard. I put these next to the Maine Lumber notes I made a couple of days ago. I tagged these “Canada” though, so I can find them all easily, plus the next set that I add about lumbering north of the border.