I’ve tripped on a fun use of contextual backlinks in my cooking practice. After I get back from the farmer’s market each week, I plan out that week’s meals, linking to empty notes for key ingredients. Over time, each ingredient grows a useful index of preparations via backlinks.
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It’s funny—I could get the same result by just searching my cooking notes for “peas,” but this feels meaningfully different in a way I don’t understand. One factor is object permanence: because peas have a concrete “place,” I add general notes on technique to that note over time.
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Another interesting advantage of object permanence is that it enables browsing. Searching depends on me having a specific query in mind, but with this approach, I can browse all notes tagged “#ingredient” (or whatever) and see what inspires me.
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Creating a node for each ingredient also increases legibility in a way that simplifies other uses -- record kitchen inventory then run a query to find recipes you have all or most of the ingredients for, without doing text matching.
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Maybe, yes! My instinct is that this kind of use case is more appealing from a “ooh, neat tool” perspective than an authentic one, but I’ll be interested to see if such use cases come up!
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i had the same feeling about this vs. searching my workflowy. think the difference is that when i make a [[peas]] page my mental map of my roam changes to accommodate it - it becomes reified as a “place” i can go, as opposed to one of countless potential search queries
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