Topic Map docs · insurgently

Topic Map reads a set of documents passage by passage and writes a card for what each passage says: a concept, a claim, a case, a practice. Every card quotes its passage, so you can always open the text behind it.

With the cards made, you can search them by meaning, find the topics a collection keeps returning to, see where two books disagree, and draft a write-up whose every quote is checked against its source. Topics are written as notes, so Obsidian's Graph view shows the clusters.

The words to know#

Word	What it is
Collection	A set of documents Topic Map reads: books on a shelf, notes in a folder or with a tag, or the rows of a Base. One note describes each collection.
Lens	What is pulled out of each passage and what gets compared. Two are built in: nonfiction and fiction. You can make your own.
Passage	A piece of a document: a chapter section, a story, a note, or one heading of a long note.
Card	What the lens found in a passage, with a quote (its anchor) from the text.
Group	The same term, with the same meaning, from several passages or books, shown once. See Repeated terms.
Topic	A group of cards that say similar things, with a name and a note of its own.
Run	One job that wrote something: indexing, a survey, finding topics, a draft. Each can be undone.

What you need#

Obsidian 1.11.4 or later, on desktop.
Model Hub, required. It holds your model providers and keys, and records what each call costs. Topic Map never holds a key.
Library Hub, only for collections of books. It reads your Calibre library. Notes and Bases work without it.

Next: Getting started. Later: Make a collection, The Topic Map panel, The topic map, How big a collection can be, and Your collections in Claude.

Also from Insurgently#

Topic Map needs Model Hub for its models; Library Hub gives it book collections:

Model Hub: your AI providers in one place, with roles, cost limits and a ledger. https://insurgently.com/docs/model-hub/
Library Hub: your books as notes, grouped into shelves. https://insurgently.com/docs/library-hub/
Learning Editor: feedback on your writing that learns your habits and never rewrites without asking. https://insurgently.com/docs/learning-editor/