Integrating hands-on, experimental research into a zettelkasten

PPainter

Hello all,

I'm a PhD student and an experimental material scientist, and I've used a zettelkasten via Obsidian for organising my review of the scientific literature. It's an incredibly useful framework for synthesising and summarising literature, but I remain unsure how to best integrate my original research (seeing as I'm yet to publish a paper!) Of course, in the humanities and social sciences the output of the zettelkasten consists of original research in and of itself, but aside from the review paper I hope to write I still have to get my hands dirty with electron microscopes and geochemical modelling software due to the nature of the field (not by itself a problem, as I love labwork).

But how I go from calculations in a spreadsheet or results from a machine to coherent zettels in obsidian isn't trivial. Does anyone have any advice about how to incorporate this kind of material into a zettelkasten?

Many thanks,

Patrick

ctietze

The data I collect in my programming work can sometimes find its way as observational notes in my Zettelkasten, but when talking about this with @Sascha who coached scientists over the years, a better idea could be to treat experimental data as external to the Zettelkasten -- as something to 'cite' and reference. 🤔