I’ve been inspired by The Hyperfine Village (see also the related twitter thread). The basic insight is that some things are naturally organized not by keyword / tag / hierarchy, but by location in a 2D/3D space. To this end, Lisa organized her Roam into the spatial categories on this map:
Org Roam
I’d love to know the communities thoughts on this concept: might leveraging our spatial reasoning facilities help maintain large knowledge graphs / Zettlekasten systems? What would you use it for?
I’m keen to test this concept with Org Roam since it’s easily hackable and I already have thousands of nodes in it to test with.
Example Uses
- Categorizing notes on projects into rooms like “Office”, “Lab”, “Attic”, “Studio” …
- Visualizing notes with geographic context (e.g. from traveling) on a world map.
- Organizing notes on books / papers in different sections of a “library” map. I imagine just pinning high-level tags (e.g. “complexity science”), and related notes would cluster around them.
Prototype Sketch
- We could render a subset of the graph with nodes clustered around given 2D coordinates and background image.
- This could be done with a new node tag specifying the map ID (image path) and the (x, y) attractor coordinate.
- Nodes without such a spatial tag would use a standard layout algorithm, naturally constrained by any spatially embedded neighbors.
- We’d likely want a way to hide nodes that are too many hops away from a spatially pinned node.
Future
I’ve had lots of fun brainstorming how far this idea could go. For example, imagine giving a virtual tour of your digital garden in something like https://gather.town/, where your interests, life projects, research passions, etc… are naturally embedded in the space. Sounds like more fun than a 1-page PDF resume!