Share your ideas & research
You’ve built your graph, it’s a work of beauty and insight — now you’re ready to share what you’ve learned.
Getting eyes on the prize
Sharing your discourse nodes
We’ve just added a feature to allow you to share “live” nodes with your collaborators by publishing them to a shared group space: The sync and import feature, currently hidden behind an admin panel.
Opening the admin panel
Sharing your discourse canvas
Presenting your Canvas
Your canvas can be used to give a PowerPoint- or Figma-like visual overview of your work.
You can start at your motivating Question and move through your hypothesis to your experiments and their results, opening each node in the sidebar to show your audience relevant details.
Example Canvas walkthrough
You can create a “presentation view” for your discourse nodes by adding the material/images you wish to highlight at the top of the page — the first image on the page is automatically selected as the image that displays on the discourse canvas.
Exporting your Canvas
You can export a static .png or .svg image of your discourse canvas from the menu.
Canvas export menu
Drafting a manuscript from your discourse graph
Using the canvas as a storyboard
You can use the discourse canvas to organize your ideas for a paper. Your canvas allows you to follow your train of thought from hypothesis formation to hypothesis testing — including the dead ends. You can see at a glance which sources (references) were crucial to the formulation of certain claims, and which informed the design of your experiments.
If you are targeting a particular journal, you might find it helpful to spatially arrange your discourse nodes according to their ms submission format. This can give you a head start on the drafting stage.
Using canvas layers to organize article sections
The Canvas layout can also be used to spot “gaps” in your argument at a glance, before Reviewer #2 rushes in to fill them with part of their œuvre.
Spotting unsupported Claims before Reviewer # 2
The Canvas is also useful for designing figure panels — particularly for deciding which figures should be composed into figure panels, and which visual evidence is crucial enough to highlight in the main body of the text vs. the supplementary information.
Experimental setup in one panel for greatest impact …
While the data speaks for itself
Arguing with your graph
Your discourse nodes should be formulated as concisely as possible (remember node = filename). But the rest of the page can be used to construct and elaborate your broader point. The example below links both Evidence and Caveats related to a Claim. In this discourse context, a Caveat is an observation that weakens the claim without necessarily opposing it. Some caveats may be promoted to Evidence that opposes a Claim after further investigation, others may become Issues: requests for additional analyses to clarify a point. Anticipating the most salient caveats to each of your claims is a useful preparation for the review stage of your ms submission.
An example of a claim with caveats
You can modify your discourse graph templates to structure key information in a way that facilitates article writing later.
An example of an Evidence node with methods context
Discourse nodes are modular and composable and can be re-used in multiple projects. One strategy to maximize composability is to capture “evergreen” information in the node template and add additional project-specific context in the “log” section.
In the Obsidian example vault CLM, HYP, ISS, EXP, & QUE node templates have a “log” section
Exporting your graph
Your discourse nodes are markdown notes, and they can be copied, printed, & exported in different formats.
While the Discourse Node Sync feature mentioned above is the only fully-supported way of sharing functional discourse nodes, you can get a quick-and-dirty approximation using copy/paste. Importing a “foreign” discourse node into your graph strips it of its relation data, but it can still be recognized as a discourse node if its NodeTypeId exists in your graph. Open the 3-dot menu in the file pane: if the option “Convert Into” exists, it is not recognized as a node, and you can select the type of node you’d like to turn it into.