New works are seeded with your perception and reactions to others’ work. As such, it is important that the material that prompted your own work should be coexist alongside whatever prompted it within the vault.
To avoid losing sight of the origin of a particular piece of content in your vault, a clear way to indicate the origin is a necessity.
The cleanest way is to use separate files to house content by origin. I currently loosely indicate content origin via My file types tagging system. I have yet to Reconfigure my type tags to indicate the origin of the content, but I think it would look something like this:
Tip
#type/- Top of the type tag hierarchy
jr/- I created it. Within this tag hierarchy, A single garage file can be of multiple types
research/- Compiled via a lot of sources with my own content woven inproject/- My own curation and decision making processtask/- What I need to dowriting/episode/- My experiencesthing/- My collection of stuff that can be interacted withother/- Someone or thing else created it
person/- Created by another person
website/- Something from the internet
clipping/- Grabbed via the Obsidian Web Clipper pluginbook/file/- Can’t easily be turned into markdown formataudiovisual- Podcast, talk, videoai/- Content generated by an AI toolscript/- Query generated result, typically used as an index / navigation
This hierarchy starts with a provenance taxonomy, then is a type taxonomy.
With that separation you can clearly identify what is your work and what is not because they are segregated into different files. You can transclude other content into files with your own as the base via links. Vice versa, you can Mark differing provenance by surrounding content in curly brackets to create marginalia within other’s work.
Use cases that are supported from this pattern include: