Beta. Clusters is not released yet. These pages describe the build in progress.
Clusters
Index passages from your books, notes and Bases, find the topics they share and answer questions with cited cards.
Clusters 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 Clusters 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. |
| 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. Clusters never holds a key.
- Books & Shelves, only for collections of books. It reads your Calibre library. Notes and Bases work without it.
Next: Getting started.