Tinderbox 10 & Journaling

Q & A - getting started with Tinderbox
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I’ve started using Tinderbox 10 (10.0.1) as a single place where I can digitize all my handwritten journals from the late 80’s onward, either by scanning in pages or actually typing in the text by hand.

I’ve already transcribing a few years worth of entries into an outline using a year|month|day hierarchy. Each day gets its own note and the title of each note has the date (mm/dd/yy) and some tags (2005-goals, software-designs, jobs, etc.) for later searching, analysis, word cloud, etc.

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I haven’t thought much beyond data entry right now but I think eventually it might be nice to have a map view that shows all my notes across months and years in a single view. Manual and automatic links between notes with similar tags might be nice. Notes with similar tags having similar styles might also be helpful. (Note: I’m still exploring the Tinderbox feature set so there might be other interesting views and automations I can put in place down the road.)

But having fooled around with the Map view a bit I think the current hierarchical structure I’m using might limit having my single birds-eye map view since the year|month|day outline I’m working with seems to “wall off” notes at higher levels, i.e. at the year level you can’t see monthly notes unless you drill down into individual boxes.

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Since each note has a title that contains the date (mm/dd/yy), would it be better to just have a single list of individual notes without the year|month parent nodes?

Also, is it better to put dates and tags in one or more of an individual note’s fields rather than concatenating them in the title? Or should the titles remain the same but the date and tag data also be put into note fields?

I know I’m just beginning this project and have just scratched the surface of Tinderbox 10 but I’d really like to not start with a structure that might limit future visualizations, automation, and analysis. So if anyone has any other suggestions please feel free to comment.

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Maps only show the contents of a single outline folder. you might find it useful to read Outline vs. Map Interface to get more of a fix on this.

Note to that a map of 500 notes isn’t as approachable as a map of 50 notes, and it looks like you have many notes. Rather than work backwards from what you can’t achieve of an imagined outcome, a more productive approach may be to look at different views for different tasks.For instance, I suspect the Attribute Browser would be productive for you.

Remember Tinderbox is a ‘toolbox’ for notes. To get traction:

  • have a clear task in mind (you do!)—some you progress and learning is practical and not theoretical
  • look at the ‘tools’ in the box that enable what you are after rather than the ‘correct’ way to do something, not least because there are usually several equally valid approaches to the task at hand.

If you’re posting OCR’d text from the scan, good. Else, simply placing images on text in notes won’t give the app tools access to that text.

HTH and if stuck, the forum is here to help. :slight_smile:

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