Roam Research for Beginners

A podcast script made in Roam

Here’s a script I made this morning using a new app I’ve been exploring this week, Roam Research. The podcast episode associated with this content is up and running, as is the video:

But I thought it might be interesting to show what writing looks like in Roam, so here it is:

• I think I'll make a video on [[[[Roam]] for beginners]]. {{word-count}}

  • The point will be to document what I'm able to do after a week of playing with it, and how it's already proving to be useful.

    • First, I'm getting stuff down in a place I'll be able to find it later.

      • There's some value to just getting things down, even if you never go back and look at them. It's practice writing, and it builds skills and habits.

      • But there's also some value to being able to go back and take advantage of the work you've done, and incorporate that into the new work and carry it forward. So there are skills and habits gained, and there's output that could be valuable, if it was accessible.

      • The problem is, a lot of the stuff I've written about the things I've read or about my own ideas is lost. I don't have the paper notebooks I wrote when I was a PhD student. Or a Masters student. Or an undergraduate. What cool stuff might I find in those, if I could go back and look at them now. Journals I kept when I was 20, or 15, or 10.

      • Luckily for the "me" of today, that doesn't have to be the fate of your creative ideas or studious records.

      • There are plenty of digital places I can put stuff today. I've tried a lot of them, and I've kept a lot of them since I turned digital. I've written using Pages, Word, web-building apps, Scrivener, Tinderbox, Storyscape. More recently, OneNote, Evernote, MarginNote 3, Goodnotes, Notability, and now [[Roam]].

      • Some of these apps are more difficult to use than others. I suspect Tinderbox is still the hardest, with the steepest learning curve. MarginNote and [[Roam]] also seem to have a lot going on under the hood, but I've been a little more successful in breaking in and finding some things I can use today as I'm learning and some videos I can watch to keep learning.

      • Some of the apps are better and some worse at serving up the information I've captured in ways that are useful to me today.

        • I made hundreds, maybe thousands, of individual records in Tinderbox. It's a pretty intense process, trying to find any particular needle in that haystack. (Again, there may be ways to do this that I'm simply not aware of, but do those ways have to be that hard to find?)

        • Other apps like Word aren't really designed to be all that hypertextual. Yes, there are now ways to full-text search that make it possible for me to find, for example, every file on my 4-terabyte "Archive of Everything" drive with the word Ranney in them. I could do that search and sift through the results, and then piece together a new article on the Ranney family, if I wanted to.

        • This would be a more-or-less forensic act, though.

      • What if there was a way to Find everything and have it appear in a way that would let me manipulate it, grab the stuff that was useful, edit it, and then publish it out? This seems to be what [[Roam]] is offering.

      • I just did a search (which [[Roam]] calls “Find or Create Page”) on the word [[Roam]]. The app searched my database and found nine times I had used the term. I got to scroll through them, and then when I hit the return key, the app made a new Page called "[[Roam]]" and told me I could either start typing or attach the "Unlinked References" it found. When I did that, they populated this new page, in reverse chronological order (that is, newest to oldest). It also put double-brackets around every instance of the word in my Notes. When I write the word again, of course, that doesn't automatically get double-bracketed -- it gets added to the Unlinked References at the bottom of the page, waiting for me to decide whether I want to link them.

      • This could be very powerful -- and the power would increase exponentially as I add information to the document. Classic network effect

    • One thought this leads to which is a bit troubling is, how safe is the data file? Roam doesn't seem to do automatic backups, but it DOES seem to have an export feature that lets you export all pages in either Markdown or JSON format. I don't really know how to use either of those formats, so I suppose I'd just have to trust that if I needed to, I could find someone to help me restore my data in case Roam suddenly disappeared. I suppose this is not that different from something like Tinderbox -- ho would I access all that data if the app no longer worked? The difference is, the app lives on my hard drive, not in the cloud.

      • Maybe this is only an issue for me because I am a dinosaur?

      • OTOH, I lost a lot of data when I stopped paying for Endnote updates.

    • One interesting last thing that I noticed when I went back to the top of this note. I had made a page (double-bracketed) the title "Roam for beginners". The app double-bracketed the word Roam itself when I did the search. So now there are nested double-brackets. it didn't occur to me that could be a thing. Cool.