Instructions for mechanics, formatting, and logistics of using Obsidian

Building a collaborative workspace in AI Ethics

You can read more about the aims behind this in the note: aaa Why… The benefits of smart notes, digital knowledge gardens, and Zettelkasten. At the very least, the notes that you write are, I hope, appropriate as assignments for the course. The potential, however, is that we can collectively develop new insights in a cumulative learning process, over the years of using this for this AI module for Digital Ethics.

Having your assignments included in this shared vault is optional. I will anonymize the contributions before other students will be able to see your notes, as I have done with student from previous years. Just let me know if you'd prefer not to have your text included.

Using plaintext formatting ("Markdown")

The Obsidian app uses Markdown, which is a very lightweight, human-readable plain-text format. Unlike Word documents or any rich-text format, plain text is non-propriety this very portable and compatible.

The markdown conventions are fairly simple, and are already widely used in email. Here is a straightforward explanation of Markdown conventions from its inventor, John Gruber.
Two other key resources are provided in the Obsidian help:

• Basic formatting syntax - Obsidian Help - which explains the basics of formatting headings, bold, italics, and even footnoting.
• Particularly important is the different between…
  • Internal links, or "WikiLinks", which refer to the title of other notes in your vault, like this: [[_Begin here - AI Ethics]].
  • Internal links - Obsidian Help
• Obsidian Flavored Markdown - Obsidian Help: This contains further useful information.
• If you like to get fancy with your own Obsidian vault, there are many rabbit-holes to disappear into: [Advanced formatting syntax - Obsidian Help](https://help.obsidian.md/Editing+and+formatting/Advanced+formatting+syntax

It's best to use Obsidian to compose your notes for the assignments, based on the templates that are provided. If you prefer, however, you can compose your entries in the format of your choice, and then convert it to markdown. Sometimes this is simply a matter of saving the final version in plaintext format with .md as the file extension before submitting it. If you have text from a word processor, it may be easiest to generate markdown text using the free web-app "Dillinger": https://dillinger.io – which also lets you export a markdown file.

Instructions for getting your "vault" in Obsidian set up

• How to set up a collaborative vault for course in AiEthics

Standardizing the formatting

In order to create a networked set of notes in Obsidian, we need to standardize the formatting.

1. You can use the template files available in the folder: Templates for assignments
2. Modify the file names for all 5 of your notes:
3. The literature filenames should be renamed to show the author, publication date, and first two keywords of the article's title, followed by your name (all in the filename): thusly "Russell2019HumanCompatible - YourLastName"
4. The "Template - Digital Ethics MiniDEC" should be renamed to as "MiniDEC - Name of Your AI Tech - YourLastName", indicating the AI tech you'll be using.
5. For the "concept note" about a key concept in ethics of AI, rename it with "ConceptNote - Your Concept - YourLastName"

Once you've finished them, move them into the appropriate folder.

• If you work on this outside of Obsidian, you can still submit the notes for inclusion by dropping your 5 finished notes (with the .md extension) into the following "FileDrop" site, and this will integrate into the full graph in Obsidian: https://surfdrive.surf.nl/files/index.php/s/rrhbqccEfl55lGP.

My current thinking is that I'll anonymize the notes, creating as it were a jointly created network of notes. But I'll be in touch about this again when everything is in. You can withdraw at any point from this part of this experimental project.