Research Vault

A living, offline-first knowledge base for the transition from software engineer → researcher in event streams, web analytics, and clickstream prediction.

The map of the whole thing lives in plan (the HOME / top-level Map of Content). Start there.

How this vault is organized

Folder-per-domain, numeric prefixes for ordering. One idea per note; link liberally with [[wikilinks]]; let the graph emerge. Filenames match link text exactly, so Obsidian resolves links by title.

Folder	What lives here
`00_Home/`	HOME + sub-MOCs (the navigation layer)
`10_Foundations/`	The math & fundamentals — authored reference notes
`20_Domain/`	Clickstream / event-stream subject knowledge + the offline compute stack
`30_Methods/`	The 3 research areas + synthetic-data craft
`40_Experiments/`	Lab notebook — one note per experiment, hypothesis first
`50_Literature/`	Zotero-linked paper notes + reading lists
`60_Craft/`	How to be a researcher — temperament, traps, checklists
`70_Tracks/`	Research portfolio — projects
`80_Templates/`	Note templates (experiment, paper, track)
`90_Inbox/`	Fleeting notes; capture first, triage weekly

Note conventions

Each note carries light YAML frontmatter and an Up: backlink to its section MOC:

---
tags: [foundations]
status: seed        # stub → seed → growing → evergreen
---
# Note title

**Up:** [[10_Foundations-MOC]]

status legend: stub (placeholder, intent only) → seed (has real content, incomplete) → growing (actively developed) → evergreen (stable, trustworthy reference).

Using it offline

Everything here is plain Markdown — readable in any editor, no internet required. Open the folder as an Obsidian vault for graph view + backlinks, or just read the files. The compute/tooling stack you'll need locally is documented in Offline compute stack.

Publishing the web book

The vault also builds into a static HTML "web book" (sidebar nav, backlinks, rendered LaTeX) and publishes via ginx. The generator is tools/build-site.ts (Bun + markdown-it + KaTeX); output goes to _site/ (git-ignored).

bun tools/build-site.ts      # rebuild _site/ from the markdown
ginx sync _site              # ship the changes (instant; rollback with `ginx rollback`)

Live at https://research-vault.ginx.cloud (publicly accessible). First-time setup was ginx create _site --subdomain research-vault; after that, edit notes → build-site → ginx sync.

Git workflow

The research history is an audit trail — commit often.

git add -A
git commit -m "notes: <what changed>"

Large data/model artifacts are git-ignored (see .gitignore) and meant to be versioned with DVC instead, so the repo stays text-only and fast to clone.