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Jem Sophia

Breadcrumbs & Rabbit Holes with Roam

Roam ↗(opens in new tab) is a potent example of technology for Augmenting Human Intelligence. Similar-but-different to Artificial Intelligence, AHI tools focus on turbocharging your brain, rather than replacing it with some fancy algorithm. Oft-mentioned, but the power in Roam is how it enables you to make connections between topics as you read, research, think & write, and develop notes into real creative output.

As someone who both struggles-with and prospers-from ADHD, Roam is the only tool I've found that fits my brain like a glove: enabling me to capture as fast as I can think, and to leave breadcrumbs for myself on the research rabbit holes I go down.

I haven't gotten around to implement full Roam-style links in this blog yet. Anything in italics in this post is something that was a link in Roam - I left them in so you can see the types of concepts I like to map.

I haven't written anything longer than an Instagram caption in 2 years, but here are 200 words I accidentally wrote Stream of Consciousness explaining some of the magic I found during an 8 hour Roam session today. It just kinda happened.

“I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.” — John Muir

The Whole Earth Catalog is a seminal publication from the 1960s Counterculture era; a huge collection of resources for those interested in everything from the Ecology and Organic Gardening to Psychology and Psychedelics. It's a rich resource, but exists on paper and huge PDF scans. 1960s counterculture also produced Personal Computers and there's rich adjacency between Augmenting Human Intelligence & the very notion of the Catalog. Roam is today's spiritual successor to Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu with its notions of Bidirectional Linking.

Today I had the idea to start transcribing The Last Whole Earth Catalog: 1971 into Roam to explore using Bidirectional Linking to browse its contents and inform my research in every area of interest I have.

If you haven't read the Whole Earth Catalog before, it might be helpful to understand a little about how it's structured.

  • There are 9-ish top-level chapters - "Understanding Whole Systems", "Land Use", "Craft" and such.

  • Each chapter contains ~30-70 pages, each with resources for a discrete topic: "Universe", "Ecology", "Biodynamic Gardening" etc.

  • Finally, each topic contains several titles: either listings of physical products (mostly books or tools etc) to buy, or letters from readers, comments, poems etc.

I started diligently at the beginning of Chapter 1 ("Understanding Whole Systems"), Subject 1 ("Buckminster Fuller"), Topic 1 ("Utopia or Oblivion"). Typing out every paragraph by hand—my OCR wasn't working well—and then going back and linking up topics. The Catalog is some 450 pages long; after 2 hours I had had a great time reading every word I'd typed about Fuller, but I realized it would take me an extremely long time to finish the project.

I was close to taking a break and working on something else, when I had an idea: ^^why not start at the top of the outline, rather than the detail?^^ Sure, having an indexed reference of every paragraph of text in the Catalog will be useful, but probably more useful to start with the broad topics involved.

If nothing else, it will help me navigate the Catalog without skipping back & forth between the hefty index at the end of the book.

So I started with table of "Contents" - outlining the main chapters. Then, I started outlining the subjects involved. And then I realized that without coming anywhere near to finishing my project, I'd given my brain a massive gift.

I might be 2 pages into a 450 page transcription project, but the taxonomy of the Catalog is now merged with my personal knowledge management system. The next time I'm reading or researching Mysticism on Roam, for example, I see a 'linked reference' to the stub of the "Mysticism" topic in the Catalog, reminding me during my research process of this valuable resource that I all-too-often forget exists.

My note on the Mysticism topic in the Catalog empty (because, like I said, it is going to take me a long while to copy & format the er…whole…catalog), but I see it there and can go and expand upon it if I wish. In the interests of showing you how I use Roam, let's keeping going with this.

Here's the corresponding spread from the Catalog

I go to the topic page and start filling my outline with more detail, all-the-while linking to people, places & things mentioned. There's lots of interesting things on that page.

An album callled Music of Tibet by monks at the Gyuto Monastery catches my eye. It was recorded by Huston Smith. I quickly copy over some notes from the Catalog to Roam, then go down an internet rabbit hole searching for information about it. To start with, Smith seems like an interesting character who should be on my radar. I'm sure I'll be reading more about him in the coming weeks & months.

I see the production was assisted by Mickey Hart: a percussionist, the drummer from the Grateful Dead, and an ethnomusicologist. I don't make bidirectional links for everyone on the album credits list (for one thing, I've been writing this article for hours and I want to go outside before it gets dark…), but Hart seems to crop up over & over again in my research and noting down his involvement seems like it will be useful in the future.

At this point, I add some tags to note in Roam - this will be useful when researching Buddhism in general, Tibetan Buddhism more specifically, Chanting, Throat Singing, Religious Music, Ethnomusicology…

My tags are relatively general - preferring Buddhism and Music to Buddhist Music for example: I can query for BOTH of them together later. Or Tibetan Buddhism and Music. or Throat Singing and Ethnomusicology, or Ethnomusicology and Album…you get the idea.

I eventually find the recording on Spotify, add the URL to my notes in Roam (more useful than a defunct PO Box, surely?) and start listening to it. It's fascinating, with each monk's voice producing multiple overtones. Like they're singing chords. Wow.

Meanwhile, whilst I was researching the album on YouTube I found a bunch of interesting YouTube interviews with Smith. I want to watch all of them, right now, but I'm trying to stay on track writing this article. They can wait. My usual options are:

  • Drop everything I'm doing to chase after every idea I have like my cat chasing a fly around the house. My ADHD brain. It's fun, but exhausting, and I really am trying to stay on track with my projects this year.

  • Leave the tabs open for later. This is how I end up with 20 Chrome windows open with 50 tabs in each. I'm trying to cut down on that, too

  • Use a bookmarking service. They've never worked for me, though - I never find things again.

Instead, in Roam, I drop interesting snippets in the right place, confident that bidirectional linking will help me find my notes and my notes find me. So I store an interesting interview with Smith from the later years of his life in The Spirit Molecule - it will pop up when I'm researching Psychedelics in the future. I also store an interview with him and Bill Moyers about Hinduism. Onwards!

Back in the Catalog there's a series of recordings from Esalen that I hadn't heard of before, including lectures by Ram Dass, John C. Lilly, Stanislav Grof, Suzuki Roshi and Joseph Campbell. If this was 1971 I could have just sent a check to the address listed in the Catalog, but alas I presume any of the publishers mentioned who still exist 50 years later have long since changed locations. Still, now we have search engines, and the Internet Archive, and the revolving crew of interesting intergenerational techno-hippies who prop up the bar at The Interval in San Francisco and all seem to have sprawling personal libraries in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I'm sure any resource I might need is findable - chatting to old hippies about the Counterculture of the 1960s is my favorite thing.

Mostly, I need to capture this information so I know where to find it later. I'm reminded of the concept in Getting Things Done whereby we use our brain to have creative ideas, not to remember todos & trivia. This seems conceptually similar to Building a Second Brain, and now, right here as I type this outline, I've linked together GTD, BASB, and Bidirectional Linking & Notetaking. Cool, Roam. Cool.

I make a note of the recordings and pop over to my Joseph Campbell page. I'm a sucker for anything related to him, so even at this early stage of using Roam his page is starting to accrue quotes, notes & reflections about him from all of the information I process. For one thing, I see my notes from The Power of Myth that he recording with Bill Moyers. Wait a second, Bill Moyers! We just mentioned him in relation to Huston Smith. I see another link in my knowledge.

And then, the linked references section of that page in Roam, I see a mention to a totally different section of Roam: "Myth". Down another rabbit hole I go, all the while confident that my wild, weird & creative ADHD brain is working in perfect harmony with my technology instead of fighting it or being destructively enabled by it.

Where once my days-long internet rabbit holes felt like distraction (at best) or self-sabotage (at worst), using Roam gives me confidence that I'm spending my time wisely and capturing knowledge in a way that helps me make links between disparate topics. This, more than any particular discipline of creativity, is my favorite thing: Creativity itself, rather than Art or Music or Design or Creative Technology. I am a humble student of Serendipity and Synchronicity, and the magic of connecting ideas in new ways.

With Roam I have a tool that lets me progressively expand my notes from keywords and stubs to paragraphs to reflections. Those reflections drive thoughts that transfigure into braindumps into structured outlines to a full essay. This doesn't even touch on 3 of my other favorite uses for Roam:

  • a (friend) CRM, helping me keep track of context, shared knowledge & commitments with the people I care about

  • a supercharged task management system, ultra-flexible based around GTD with integration into my Knowledge Management system

  • an extremely convenient Daily Logbook, with seamless referencing of notes & tasks.

More on those soon I guess. I didn't intend to write this article - I was honestly just trying to spend my afternoon adding some links to my notes about Buckminster Fuller, but 2000 words later, here we are. This is the most I've written in a single session in as long as I can remember: definitely several years.

Roam is a tool that turns my brain into a supercomputer.