✨ Constellation
Per The American Heritage Dictionary: constellation noun 1. a grouping of ☀️ Main-Sequence Note on the celestial sphere perceived as a figure or design 2. a set or configuration, as of related items, properties, ideas, or individuals.
Constellations what i refer to what are usually called MOCs (maps of content) in PKM communities. Constellations are a type of higher-order note consisting of central collection of notes about a certain subject. They serve to help me navigate 🔮 The Cosmos easier. As your notes and your vault reach critical mass and there are too many notes to manage easily and find what you’re looking for, you start to feel that tickle of overwhelm and you’re going to start needing some level of structure. That’s when you need to become a cartographer of your own content and create a new constellation. The ability to know when and how to make an constellation is a key skill in overcoming overwhelm and project slowdown.
I like to use constellations for tags in my notes. I tag each of my notes with various constellations. Constellations tend to start as uncreated notes. These constellations show up on my graph as uncreated nodes. The more a constellation is linked to, the bigger it becomes it is in my graph. Over time i might see that i’m liking to a particular constellation often and that it may be a prominent topic in 🔮 The Cosmos. I might want to create that note and promote it to a constellation and organize its associated notes.
Unlike folders or Table of Contents, constellations are not hierarchical. They are heterarchical. This means that different constellations can map the same info in different ways, to fit whatever your current needs might be. Constellations also remain ready to evolve as your thoughts grow, mature, develop complexity on a subject.
Constellations prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies and maintain fluidity. As opposed to folders, constellations are nondestructive, non-restrictive, non-limiting perspectives. They are not like prestrucured folders where all of your notes must fall. That sort of management becomes too much of an encumbrance. it’s too much friction for you to write and connect notes when you have to sort and file them in the correct location based on the taxonomy that you have already set for yourself. Constellations are more like “overlays” that add relevant information but that don’t affect your base level notes.
By organizing your notes this way, you are able to see structure emerge from the bottom up in a process of self-organization. You no longer feel stumped when a note does not fit within one of your predefined categories you have already decided you care about. Instead, you respond to authentic interest and thought instead of thinking “I should write about X.” Thus constellations allow you to follow non-forcing when learning and writing.
This avoids the pitfalls with the approach that our society ordinarily takes with education, such as how forced material and class schedules leads students to become indifferent towards self-initiaited learning. They also encourage self-reliance because they do not follow a prestructured curriculum organized by someone else, whereas schools encourage intellectual dependency towards authority by discouraging inquiry.
References
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Jenks, Bryan. (2021). Here Is How I Use Tags And Links In Obsidian To Manage My Zettelkasten. Youtube. https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=zIh1S7ra3aI.
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Milo, Nick LYT Kit. https://notes.linkingyourthinking.com/Umami/The+forest+entrance.