Monthly Archives: May 2020

Roaming through contexts with Roam: Distinction

This is the second part of the series on Roam. The first part was about what is Roam like. If you’ve read it or if you know already, carry on.

The concept of digital twin became popular thanks to the digital transformation fad. It’s now amplified by both market research companies such as Gartner, and by academics.

Roam is expected to be the digital twin of your brain. Working with Roam is like “building a second brain”, the community echoes, after the training course of Tiago Forte by the same name.

Looking at Roam as a second brain is understandable. It is conditioned by a long history of swapping metaphors between computer science and cognitive science. At first computer science used the brain as a metaphor for the computer. This was reciprocated by cognitive science taking the computer as a metaphor for the brain. But, as Lakoff and Johnsson convincingly demonstrated, metaphors are not innocent figures of speech. And indeed, the-brain-as-a-computer was not just a metaphor. It was, and for many still is, a guiding light and a paradigm in cognitive science. As with computer, the brain was understood as both a location of the mind and as a processor of representations. Both computationalist and connectionist schools in cognitive science and philosophy of mind held this view of cognition and still do1The computationalist even saw the mind not just as a processor of representations but of symbolic ones. This goes in line with the symbolic tradition in mathematics which paved the path of many sciences. For the consequences and alternatives, see http://iconicmath.com/ . Now, to go through all the arguments on why this is not the case is beyond the objectives of this article, but the curious ones are invited to follow them2These arguments are well developed in the following books: The Embodied Mind; Enaction; Mind in Life; Linguistic Bodies . Let’s just say that, if you are using Roam with the expectation that it will be your second brain, you might be disappointed. But here’s the good news:

Roam is even better than that.

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  • 1
    The computationalist even saw the mind not just as a processor of representations but of symbolic ones. This goes in line with the symbolic tradition in mathematics which paved the path of many sciences. For the consequences and alternatives, see http://iconicmath.com/ .
  • 2
    These arguments are well developed in the following books: The Embodied Mind; Enaction; Mind in Life; Linguistic Bodies

Roaming through contexts with Roam

The first note-taking tool I used was Zim. What I liked most about it was that every word or piece of text in a note could be easily turned into a new linked note. And each note showed backlinks to all other notes referring to it. All that is stored as simple text files. Neat and powerful.

Yet, it was a standalone application. Having no native mobile app and no clipping functionality made it difficult to integrate with my workflows. For example, I had to collect and organise my bookmarks and web clipping elsewhere.

So I moved to Evernote. It offered a good mobile app with a document camera. Evernote improved my workflows. A note can be created from a mail message, from any web page or selection of it. Evernote quickly took centre stage in my personal information management, supporting not only note-taking and content collection, but also task management and research. And I found my way of using it, which is not necessarily the way it is commonly used. I’ve described it here.

And I’ve been using Evernote for more than 10 years now. But all that time I’ve been missing the ability to create notes from the context of another note, the ability to effortlessly turn strings into things.

The other lasting frustration has been the required maintenance. Without good filing with tags and notebooks, it’s impossible to make use of the content. And this constant split of effort between core content and managing metadata turned Evernote into more of a storage room than a place for work and creativity.

I heard of Notion and other nice alternatives, but none of them justified the migration cost. I had amassed over 12 000 notes in Evernote.

Enter Roam.

I found in Roam all that I was missing in Evernote. And initially, I thought, that’s all there is to it. It’s just a package of the capabilities I was missing. As it turned out, Roam offered much more than that. Roam is not just useful for supporting any kind of knowledge work, it also stimulates writing and thinking. It has certain affordances by design, which makes it addictive. But unlike drugs, it is a healthy addiction.

What is Roam like?

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