A Beginner’s Guide to Roam Research — source summary
The Sweet Setup’s beginner’s guide (July 2020) to roam-research, chased as a source
for the modern tools-for-thought gap. Capture in raw/roam-research-guide.md.
Key points
- Roam departs from file/folder structures; notes are linked like a graph.
- Bidirectional
[[double bracket]]links auto-create pages; references surface automatically. The author: it “completely changed the way I take notes.” - Backlinks with context — “Linked References” + “Unlinked References” (mentions you never formally linked), surfacing forgotten/uncaptured associations.
- Block references (
(() transclude any single bullet (each has an ID); Daily Notes open by default. - Notes as nodes, links as edges — “more like Wikipedia than a traditional notes app”; a Graph Overview; links give notes “compound interest.”
- Lineage: the source ties Roam’s idea to 1960s hypertext principles underlying the web (cf. douglas-engelbart). It does not discuss Obsidian/Logseq.
Why it matters here
See roam-research — Roam’s wikilink→auto-page→backlink mechanic is the llm-wiki‘s linking UX, and its “Unlinked References” are a first step toward the automated association that gbrain and the LLM wikis complete.