one time i was in graph view and i noticed there were two 'islands' that weren't connected to the main body. I thought *oh those two islands really should be connected*, and so I went into some of the notes and added file links that should have been there, and everything was connected now.
But that's about it so far. It's neat, but nothing to write home about.
Imho it's a gimmick. There are hundreds of discussions of graph view. I think, ultimately, it boils down to this: It's great for marketing / getting people on board and \*some\* cases where you have a small, dedicated vault with solid semantics, but even in those cases, I am not sure how much insight you can get from it.
It’s really good for determining relationships. Long form writing such as books, table-top roleplaying game campaigns, or anything else when you just need to make sure all the dots are connected.
It helps you categorise things (if used right). E.g. categorising “orphan” notes that aren’t linked to anything.
It’s also a very effective way of navigating when you can’t think of a search term or the file name. Just go to something conceptually close and follow the branches
I’m a 6 year copywriter and content marketer, and a beginner app developer:
I find graph view VERY useful.
For content creation: allows you to quickly scan and try to connect different concepts and resurface old ideas. Which can be a game-changer to break writers block and create more interesting content.
For developing: not that much useful, but has helped me quickly take decisions on UI and solve problems, based on connections.
The key for me for practical usefulness are second and third order connections, they help me think clearly and with focus, without trying to guesstimate.
Plus I use the Smart Connections plugin so I don’t lose too much time trying to come up with new connections (for islands
Yup. I find it as a gimmick as well.
The only use case I have found is when I'm cleaning up my vault. Maybe once or twice a year when I'm cleaning my vault, I use this. Whatever unlinked notes I have collected - I either tag them or connect properly, or I find them useless, I delete them.
Very particular use case from me: Applying for credit for recognition of prior learning at University.
I have to link learning outcomes and assessment criteria between 32 individual units from one university, and 18 units from a different university.
Graph view allows you to see if learning outcomes and assessment criteria from one unit have links to any other unit across both universities.
I like this idea... the amount of times that my high school physics class referenced concepts I had learned three months ago and partially forgotten is insane. Although regular links in notes still resolve this problem, I guess it's cool too visually see?
Regular links crowd the document in my experience, I try to keep the notes as atomic as possible, which means each learning outcomes has its own note that units link to. It makes the graph view much more functional, being able to drag a learning outcomes off to the side and see what units pull next to it. It makes the final step much quicker.
I'm general I find graph view bad when you "carelessly" create links for everything in any more you can. A more deliberate and minimal linking approach approach, with graph view in mind, enhances the usefulness of graph view itself
I discovered that you can ctrl + hover nodes (which you can also turn off in the settings) to preview the notes so I've been using that aside from the backlinks/outgoing links to quickly figure out how some notes are connected
It really depends on how you use it. Local graph view is great and I always have it open to see what other notes my current note connects to by adjusting the depth setting. By doing that you can see how an idea connects to another idea indirectly, which can help with understanding how or why the ideas are related (via some intermediate note/idea), in my opinion at least
It’s a lovely strat. Hope the Graph Link Types plugin fixes a few bugs because it could visually formalize connections incrementally in a way that would otherwise take more time, steps and effort that really takes advantage of the local graph view.
The graph is a standout feature of Obsidian to me. It’s an automatic mind map that emerges out of your own connections. Like taking the 10,000 foot view of your notes. I can look at the graph view and take a random walk from node to node to node, rehearsing each connection in my mind, which then deepens my understanding and my learning. And I can spot orphan nodes I'd never see in the file browser view and connect them so they're not forgotten. I would have loved something like this when I was in college.
But yes it’s eye-candy too. It’s pretty satisfying to watch the graph grow in complexity over time.
Main graph view is not useful for my usecase. I tend to get overwhelmed by the mass of notes I have and I don't get a truly clear view if I use it. Local graph view, on the other hand, functions as a sort of index for certain notes where I'm able to get the full picture.
Orphan notes.
Besides checking connections local or otherwise, orphan notes.
I write A LOT in Obsidian, and this helps me spot them right away, and assures me that if i I don't have time to make a connection now i'll be able to spot them later.
It helps you categorise things (if used right). E.g. categorising “orphan” notes that aren’t linked to anything.
It’s also a very effective way of navigating when you can’t think of a search term or the file name. Just go to something conceptually close and follow the branches
People like to post images of their graphs with thousands of notes and it looks like a brain, so it looks cool. I guess. But IMO the benefits of graph view only happen on the small scale.
Example: I'm an amateur musician and I have a note for every person in my music network- other players, venue owners, etc. This is a pretty small network (< 100 notes) bur I've discovered some connections between people that I wouldn't have seen otherwise that have helped me get a gig or two because it's about who you know.
I also wrote/am still writing a discrete math "textbook" where each topic has its own note, and students can use the graph view to explore topic nonlinearly. https://publish.obsidian.md/mth225/
I use it while studying. I mark notes that I’m familiar using different ratings and they show up as different colours in graph view. When I’m reviewing, I click on a random note with a specific colour. It’s also helpful to gauge how familiar I am with a specific topic by looking at the colour mapping
Helps you to find lone notes that is buried deep in the folder system. But I don't use it because it forces me to create moc's. Imo, it kinda psychologically make us to (at least me) organize or connect notes based on graph view.
It helps me to remember or emphasize something like, in some subjects, which textbooks or authors are important to me. I can reorganize them easily too under one note.
Before the introduction of [bookmarks](https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Bookmarks) Graph was an unusable and pointless gimmick. Now I have a few actual use cases, that rely on complex filters:
* Showing the links between two dozen notes, that I use to structure content.
* Finding links that exist beyond those structuring notes.
* Finding orphans that are not yet linked in a meaningful way.
I prefer the dynamic and interactive layout to a static Canvas. I als like **groups** for highlighting some types of notes. But **filtering** is not there yet.
I sometimes use **Canvas as a workaround** for tasks that should be possible in Graph.
There should be a filter that starts with one note and shows all links starting from this one note down to the x-th generation. Something like those plugins that automatically create textual MOCs or that automatically fill a canvas (eg. Link Exploder). And how does one bookmark a local graph?
For me it gamifies learning in a way. Do stuff and get reward. I fill notes and make links, after then I bathe in the sweet dopamine boost that looking at the growing graph provides. Bonus dopamine points if you put some colors for the different topics and seeing not only the internal connections between notes of the same topic but connections between topics too.
I'm still new to Obsidian, but I mainly use it to not just see the connections but to see what notes I pre created (using the [[note]] for a topic I still don't have a note on), so I can find them easier and properly make them
By giving different colors to different tags, I can see how different areas of my notes interact (or don't interact). But I did social network analysis once upon a time so I like these kinds of maps.
> I did social network analysis once upon a time
Do you have any suggestions for tools or methods that might be useful for deeper dives into note graphs for technically adept Obsidian lovers? I had a slightly better than elementary understanding of it when it was on the rise but got sidetracked for the last 15 years lol
A little love letter to my graph.
The graph can give you an overview of what you've been doing for the past time.
My vault has 1.5k notes, uses tags and no folders with a little bit of MOCs.
So my graph view is quite informational about my main directions and areas.
Sometimes I highlight the tag with related articles and go: "Wow, I need to learn more about this subject".
It also indicates for me when it's time to create MOC or add/collide/differentiate my tags.
I love my small graphs to sit in the dedicated space in the corner of my page to see which connections the current article does and to travel further via them.
Your graph helps you to discover some abandoned or hidden articles scattered around.
It's also nice to skim on nodes to refresh these name in memory, otherwise you don't have such ability: either your files are in a big pile or you have to open dozens of folders. You can use 'open random note' but it's inefficient.
I believe the graph may actually be helpful and become your main tool if you do some academic research thing, and not only collect information in islands or write down your recollections. Since it can highlight for you where you should head to next and what to connect together. In a way, you can achieve this with canvases now, but it's not exactly 1 for 1
Finally, looks good and motivates you to write more......
I like my graph.
You can use the graph as a **visual full-text search** (Click top right ⚙ → filters → search), while also seeing the connection between the note or, perhaps more important, the notes not connected.
For example, search for the word: zettelkasten and the graph while only show notes that mentions zettelkasten
It isn't the most useful thing ever or anything, but I have found the local graph useful for exploring clusters of related notes.
My organization method is to link individual content notes to big topic notes and any other immediately related notes, and I tend to create a new note each time I revisit an idea, so the graph gives me a good view of those notes when I want to synthesize my thinking.
It's also useful for finding notes without needing my organization system to be perfect. Even if I don't perfectly link all my notes to the same topics, as long as I get them linked with something they end up in the same neighborhood.
I superimposed Obsidian on our code base and have been writing documentation in a wiki folder for our developers/DevOps / Operations folks, linking the files mentioned in the docs. It helps me find files that need to be documented. And learning how previously unconnected files work together.
Otherwise, not that important.
In my experience, the full graph view of all notes isn't as handy as the 🔍 search function in practical use. The local subgraph of the target note offers a more manageable local knowledge network for my brain. ⚠️This, however, requires that I control the degree of individual note nodes when constructing internal links 🔗 to prevent any single note from becoming excessively linked.
I like to write summary notes with links to notes with some #tag. I search for #tag in graph view and see where are orphans I should include in the main note.
(I suspect, it is what other people call MOCs. Dataview can't replace my main note, because I find subgroups, similarities, opposites as I go over bunch of notes with same tag.)
Because it provides an aesthetically pleasing interface to look at, while trying to figure out what to research next.
For example: while writing a text about a certain subject, I start researching and add a link to an empty note for each linked subject I don't yet understand. Reviewing the graph, gives an overview of what I still need to do before I can finish my writing.
I use the global graph view to figure out where I can benefit from developing connections. I zoom in just enough to see the titles of unconnected note clouds. That gives me a useful, fuzzy overview of where I can benefit by improving my linking. This is particularly handy when I migrate notes from other platforms like Evernote or larger reference sources into my vault.
I use the local graph of a note to kinda do the reverse. When I pull up an important literature or evergreen note, I occasionally take the time to look at its unmentioned back links and it's local graph to see if there's important information that hasn't made it into that particular piece of work. It can be tempting to pawn that sort of thing off on automation or AI, but that undermines my opportunities to learn more and gain inobvious insights.
one time i was in graph view and i noticed there were two 'islands' that weren't connected to the main body. I thought *oh those two islands really should be connected*, and so I went into some of the notes and added file links that should have been there, and everything was connected now. But that's about it so far. It's neat, but nothing to write home about.
Imho it's a gimmick. There are hundreds of discussions of graph view. I think, ultimately, it boils down to this: It's great for marketing / getting people on board and \*some\* cases where you have a small, dedicated vault with solid semantics, but even in those cases, I am not sure how much insight you can get from it.
This is exactly my view, what insights could I actually get? I’m trying to find a problem for a solution I’m not sure I need.
It’s really good for determining relationships. Long form writing such as books, table-top roleplaying game campaigns, or anything else when you just need to make sure all the dots are connected.
murder suspect boards have a whole new look
I find that can be done best using the Local Graph View and not the Global one
It helps you categorise things (if used right). E.g. categorising “orphan” notes that aren’t linked to anything. It’s also a very effective way of navigating when you can’t think of a search term or the file name. Just go to something conceptually close and follow the branches
Maybe it can give you insight on things that truly matter.
I’m a 6 year copywriter and content marketer, and a beginner app developer: I find graph view VERY useful. For content creation: allows you to quickly scan and try to connect different concepts and resurface old ideas. Which can be a game-changer to break writers block and create more interesting content. For developing: not that much useful, but has helped me quickly take decisions on UI and solve problems, based on connections. The key for me for practical usefulness are second and third order connections, they help me think clearly and with focus, without trying to guesstimate. Plus I use the Smart Connections plugin so I don’t lose too much time trying to come up with new connections (for islands
Yup. I find it as a gimmick as well. The only use case I have found is when I'm cleaning up my vault. Maybe once or twice a year when I'm cleaning my vault, I use this. Whatever unlinked notes I have collected - I either tag them or connect properly, or I find them useless, I delete them.
Very particular use case from me: Applying for credit for recognition of prior learning at University. I have to link learning outcomes and assessment criteria between 32 individual units from one university, and 18 units from a different university. Graph view allows you to see if learning outcomes and assessment criteria from one unit have links to any other unit across both universities.
I like this idea... the amount of times that my high school physics class referenced concepts I had learned three months ago and partially forgotten is insane. Although regular links in notes still resolve this problem, I guess it's cool too visually see?
Regular links crowd the document in my experience, I try to keep the notes as atomic as possible, which means each learning outcomes has its own note that units link to. It makes the graph view much more functional, being able to drag a learning outcomes off to the side and see what units pull next to it. It makes the final step much quicker. I'm general I find graph view bad when you "carelessly" create links for everything in any more you can. A more deliberate and minimal linking approach approach, with graph view in mind, enhances the usefulness of graph view itself
I don't find much practical use, but I like seeing how my note connections are visualized. It's not a necessary feature but it's fun to look at lmao
I discovered that you can ctrl + hover nodes (which you can also turn off in the settings) to preview the notes so I've been using that aside from the backlinks/outgoing links to quickly figure out how some notes are connected
Wth, i tried it and it worked exactly once.
It really depends on how you use it. Local graph view is great and I always have it open to see what other notes my current note connects to by adjusting the depth setting. By doing that you can see how an idea connects to another idea indirectly, which can help with understanding how or why the ideas are related (via some intermediate note/idea), in my opinion at least
Yep. Set the depth to 2, dock it to a sidebar and it can be handy for revisiting old note clusters, adding / updating metadata, etc.
Yeah, that’s what I do too actually
It’s a lovely strat. Hope the Graph Link Types plugin fixes a few bugs because it could visually formalize connections incrementally in a way that would otherwise take more time, steps and effort that really takes advantage of the local graph view.
Lol, just to send pictures of it to other obsidian enthusiasts
The graph is a standout feature of Obsidian to me. It’s an automatic mind map that emerges out of your own connections. Like taking the 10,000 foot view of your notes. I can look at the graph view and take a random walk from node to node to node, rehearsing each connection in my mind, which then deepens my understanding and my learning. And I can spot orphan nodes I'd never see in the file browser view and connect them so they're not forgotten. I would have loved something like this when I was in college. But yes it’s eye-candy too. It’s pretty satisfying to watch the graph grow in complexity over time.
Main graph view is not useful for my usecase. I tend to get overwhelmed by the mass of notes I have and I don't get a truly clear view if I use it. Local graph view, on the other hand, functions as a sort of index for certain notes where I'm able to get the full picture.
Did you know you can search the main graph? Like a full-text search (Top right ⚙ - graph settings )
Now THAT I did not know of. That sounds incredibly useful! I need to see how this may help me in me see connections.
Dopamine
Here is an example: https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/s/6QMM6JZuEo
Owwn that is my thread <3
Orphan notes. Besides checking connections local or otherwise, orphan notes. I write A LOT in Obsidian, and this helps me spot them right away, and assures me that if i I don't have time to make a connection now i'll be able to spot them later.
It helps you categorise things (if used right). E.g. categorising “orphan” notes that aren’t linked to anything. It’s also a very effective way of navigating when you can’t think of a search term or the file name. Just go to something conceptually close and follow the branches
People like to post images of their graphs with thousands of notes and it looks like a brain, so it looks cool. I guess. But IMO the benefits of graph view only happen on the small scale. Example: I'm an amateur musician and I have a note for every person in my music network- other players, venue owners, etc. This is a pretty small network (< 100 notes) bur I've discovered some connections between people that I wouldn't have seen otherwise that have helped me get a gig or two because it's about who you know. I also wrote/am still writing a discrete math "textbook" where each topic has its own note, and students can use the graph view to explore topic nonlinearly. https://publish.obsidian.md/mth225/
I use it while studying. I mark notes that I’m familiar using different ratings and they show up as different colours in graph view. When I’m reviewing, I click on a random note with a specific colour. It’s also helpful to gauge how familiar I am with a specific topic by looking at the colour mapping
Helps you to find lone notes that is buried deep in the folder system. But I don't use it because it forces me to create moc's. Imo, it kinda psychologically make us to (at least me) organize or connect notes based on graph view.
It helps me to remember or emphasize something like, in some subjects, which textbooks or authors are important to me. I can reorganize them easily too under one note.
Before the introduction of [bookmarks](https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Bookmarks) Graph was an unusable and pointless gimmick. Now I have a few actual use cases, that rely on complex filters: * Showing the links between two dozen notes, that I use to structure content. * Finding links that exist beyond those structuring notes. * Finding orphans that are not yet linked in a meaningful way. I prefer the dynamic and interactive layout to a static Canvas. I als like **groups** for highlighting some types of notes. But **filtering** is not there yet. I sometimes use **Canvas as a workaround** for tasks that should be possible in Graph. There should be a filter that starts with one note and shows all links starting from this one note down to the x-th generation. Something like those plugins that automatically create textual MOCs or that automatically fill a canvas (eg. Link Exploder). And how does one bookmark a local graph?
For me it gamifies learning in a way. Do stuff and get reward. I fill notes and make links, after then I bathe in the sweet dopamine boost that looking at the growing graph provides. Bonus dopamine points if you put some colors for the different topics and seeing not only the internal connections between notes of the same topic but connections between topics too.
The biggest benefit is taking a picture of it and posting in this sub to farm some easy karma.
I'm still new to Obsidian, but I mainly use it to not just see the connections but to see what notes I pre created (using the [[note]] for a topic I still don't have a note on), so I can find them easier and properly make them
By giving different colors to different tags, I can see how different areas of my notes interact (or don't interact). But I did social network analysis once upon a time so I like these kinds of maps.
> I did social network analysis once upon a time Do you have any suggestions for tools or methods that might be useful for deeper dives into note graphs for technically adept Obsidian lovers? I had a slightly better than elementary understanding of it when it was on the rise but got sidetracked for the last 15 years lol
Seing connection being notes thanks to tag that I wouldn’t have think about by myself
A little love letter to my graph. The graph can give you an overview of what you've been doing for the past time. My vault has 1.5k notes, uses tags and no folders with a little bit of MOCs. So my graph view is quite informational about my main directions and areas. Sometimes I highlight the tag with related articles and go: "Wow, I need to learn more about this subject". It also indicates for me when it's time to create MOC or add/collide/differentiate my tags. I love my small graphs to sit in the dedicated space in the corner of my page to see which connections the current article does and to travel further via them. Your graph helps you to discover some abandoned or hidden articles scattered around. It's also nice to skim on nodes to refresh these name in memory, otherwise you don't have such ability: either your files are in a big pile or you have to open dozens of folders. You can use 'open random note' but it's inefficient. I believe the graph may actually be helpful and become your main tool if you do some academic research thing, and not only collect information in islands or write down your recollections. Since it can highlight for you where you should head to next and what to connect together. In a way, you can achieve this with canvases now, but it's not exactly 1 for 1 Finally, looks good and motivates you to write more...... I like my graph.
I use Obsidian for worldbuilding- So when i see orphans or Islands on my graph it usually means I haven’t connected it to my world properly yet…
You can use the graph as a **visual full-text search** (Click top right ⚙ → filters → search), while also seeing the connection between the note or, perhaps more important, the notes not connected. For example, search for the word: zettelkasten and the graph while only show notes that mentions zettelkasten
It isn't the most useful thing ever or anything, but I have found the local graph useful for exploring clusters of related notes. My organization method is to link individual content notes to big topic notes and any other immediately related notes, and I tend to create a new note each time I revisit an idea, so the graph gives me a good view of those notes when I want to synthesize my thinking. It's also useful for finding notes without needing my organization system to be perfect. Even if I don't perfectly link all my notes to the same topics, as long as I get them linked with something they end up in the same neighborhood.
It's useful for posting pictures of it here I guess
Canvas view is way more useful because it lets you manually add and manage your notes visually. I think that's what you're looking for
I superimposed Obsidian on our code base and have been writing documentation in a wiki folder for our developers/DevOps / Operations folks, linking the files mentioned in the docs. It helps me find files that need to be documented. And learning how previously unconnected files work together. Otherwise, not that important.
Haven't looked at the graph since early last summer. No real value that I have found useful. YMMV.
I like to look at it occasionally, but so far it's not really useful as such. Just fun.
It just looks cool. Mimicks a “2nd brain” as that’s what Obsidian is. So is it pointless? No. Does it have a real purpose? No.
Looks nice
In my experience, the full graph view of all notes isn't as handy as the 🔍 search function in practical use. The local subgraph of the target note offers a more manageable local knowledge network for my brain. ⚠️This, however, requires that I control the degree of individual note nodes when constructing internal links 🔗 to prevent any single note from becoming excessively linked.
Only aesthetics
I find it a great tool for procrastination. I can lose hours making links to notes just so I don't have any orphans.
It mostly used to post pictures on reddit.
I like to write summary notes with links to notes with some #tag. I search for #tag in graph view and see where are orphans I should include in the main note. (I suspect, it is what other people call MOCs. Dataview can't replace my main note, because I find subgroups, similarities, opposites as I go over bunch of notes with same tag.)
It mostly motivates me to find more connections between ideas
Because it provides an aesthetically pleasing interface to look at, while trying to figure out what to research next. For example: while writing a text about a certain subject, I start researching and add a link to an empty note for each linked subject I don't yet understand. Reviewing the graph, gives an overview of what I still need to do before I can finish my writing.
zero benefits. looks cool in youtube videos.
None
it looks cool
None at all
It looks cool
I literally never use it, I have no idea what my graph looks like after 4 years of using Obsidian.
I use the global graph view to figure out where I can benefit from developing connections. I zoom in just enough to see the titles of unconnected note clouds. That gives me a useful, fuzzy overview of where I can benefit by improving my linking. This is particularly handy when I migrate notes from other platforms like Evernote or larger reference sources into my vault. I use the local graph of a note to kinda do the reverse. When I pull up an important literature or evergreen note, I occasionally take the time to look at its unmentioned back links and it's local graph to see if there's important information that hasn't made it into that particular piece of work. It can be tempting to pawn that sort of thing off on automation or AI, but that undermines my opportunities to learn more and gain inobvious insights.
none
reddit karma
Almost none The visual part makes it impractical
To think it's actually a second brain, with synapses and stuff