Thread by @RobertHaisfield

Reading @DellAnnaLuca’s excellent book “Ergodicity” in its Roam form right now. The book’s content is excellent, but that’s not the focus of this thread. Since it’s pioneering the Roam book form, I wanted to give some thought on how the transition from paper to Roam is handled.

First I’ll point out the positives. It is really cool having the full text accessible in my own database. Annotating directly within Roam allows me access to my full knowledge base, and being able to reorganize its structure as I see fit is a treat.

https://twitter.com/DellAnnaLuca/status/1324053703981207552

I love that he made certain Roam/css improvements to augment the reading experience. For example, the styling to allow for footnotes was an excellent choice. Also, having pages built for quick definition lookups is great.

However, it could be built better for queries or non linear traversal. This is because there is 0 indentation to mark how ideas are related w/i passages. This reduces the reader’s ability to traverse the book through linked references and connections.

https://twitter.com/RobertHaisfield/status/1314264386828038144

Take the table of contents. By default, there's no indentation throughout. On each chapter's page, you'll see in the linked references that the page was mentioned in the table of contents. That's not really useful.

Now indent all of the subchapters under Part 1 like this. Then the linked references will show its context within the table of contents, since it's indented within an indentation structure.

Now take this passage on population outcomes. With 0 indentation, population outcomes is not related to Russian Roulette. Each block will show up on its own for the linked references.

Now what if we indent? We could do it like this with nesting to follow a thread of thought. Now we could filter linked references to see when [[Russian Roulette]] relates to a [[population outcome]] and see that whole chain of reasoning.

A more stylistically pleasing way to do it might be to indent the content of each heading underneath the heading, and tag at the top level. Then you could do the same sort of filtering shown above.

This lets you see how concepts come together to structure arguments.

Aside: this is why I don't recommend people bulk import their notes from past applications. If your notes were structured for a page with 0 indentation, they won't fully translate to Roam. Indentation (and lack of it) means something in Roam. From: @balajis

I guess my big gripe with the book is the lack of thought put into modeling the structure of his arguments through the structure of linked references and indentation. Currently, 80% of it is a hyperlinked table of contents, the chapter titles aren’t informative about their claims

Writing in Roam is fundamentally different from writing on linear pages in books. I don't feel as though Ergodicity differentiated the experience between mediums much. The stylistic choices described in this thread may not be the right ones, but indentation is a primitive of Roam

There's still a lot to explore in terms of how a Roam book should be structured, and I'm grateful @DellAnnaLuca for pioneering! We aren't going to figure out what Roam books could look like if people aren't publishing.

It goes without saying that I'm willing to discuss any of this feedback, Luca. I really admire the book you've put out and the undertaking of making a Roam book, but I think the medium was underutilized to a significant degree.

Bigger than this thread, I believe it's a failure of @RoamResearch's onboarding that indentation is so misunderstood by so many users. It's core to Roam's function and how it differentiates itself from other applications, and yet long-time users are surprised when I describe it.

In the coming weeks I intend to make a short video about indentation, but if you'd like to learn more now about the implications of indentation on linked references, metadata, structuring args, and queries, see my recent Path to Power User workshop. robhaisfield.podia.com

Update: indents were originally included, but removed because when you import a Roam JSON everything will be collapsed by default, leading to an inconvenient reader experience. This is fair given Roam’s limitations, and something I would like to see changed by the platform!

https://twitter.com/dellannaluca/status/1324226114823311360