Using aliases for full titles of sources in literature notes SOP
Obsidian conventions, Obsidian tips,
⇒ Using aliases for full titles of sources in literature notes
I keep discovering new uses for aliases. Here’s the latest.
For literature notes, I’ve adopted a convention “Author1999KeyTitlewords” for page titles. It’s nicely compact, and it keeps me from running afoul of the restrictions on what punctuation you can use in page titles (since they’re also filenames). But sometimes I want to see a full title and/or multiple authors in the text I’m typing. By adding more title info to the alias in the metadata, I get several benefits:
- the option of including a longer, more informative title of the source for the literature note;
- autocompletion picks up more words from the full title (see also my forum tip on this);
- emojis in the page title (which I’m experimenting with as useful for sorting files) don’t clutter up the Preview version of the page.
The screenshot shows what I do:
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Using aliases for full titles of literature notes1210×782 91.9 KB
](https://forum.obsidian.md/uploads/default/original/2X/f/fa8054a6d867470aa46ebecb1df4909c5145c2d6.png)
And this is what it looks like, in Preview, to use this alias in the text:
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Preview of alias for title of literature note
BTW: if you’re interested in a pre-publication version of this article, it’s available from my ResearchGate page.
2021-07-20 - Email to Eleanor Konik: LYT House Question
How are you using Outgoing Links? I seems really useful, for finding words and phrases that are already note titles. What’s especially powerful about it is that it also picks up on aliases. Wow! So then I can refer to a long note title (“The social media technology of liking is responsible for most of the pernicious effects of the attention economy”) with aliases words of short phrases as aliases, like “attention economy” and “liking”. Then, I can have another note titled “The Buddhist concept of Manaskāra offers an alternative basis for critiquing the attention economy” and give it the alias “attention economy” as well. Then, in the Outgoing Links pane, I can look at a note that contains the phrase “attention economy”, and I’ve got a couple of ways I can created aliased links to that note. But if I have notes with very short, frequently used phrases (and had one with “Obsidian”), then there is too much noise.
As I write this, I’m starting to think…. “this way lies madness”. But I thought I’d share it. Anyway, that’s what I was groping towards. I think I’ve crossed the streams…. Now we have not only the "tags vs links vs folders” debate, but the "tags vs links vs folders vs aliases” debate!
!Using aliases for full titles of literature notes.jpg
!Preview of alias for title of literature note.jpg