**Please Note:** This is a preliminary overview, and is subject to change at any time. Changes will be annotated. Also, please note that I am not an accredited university, and you're not actually getting college credits here. I feel like I need to say that, I don't know why. ![[Untitled.jpg]] # Course Title: Big Dig Energy 101 ## The Driving Philosophy of This Project Simple frameworks for research and data should be designed to give rise to intelligent discussion and complex analysis on an infinite scale. ** My methods are intended to facilitate endless potential for "moments of clarity" on a reliable basis.** And they do. In the digital age, information is everywhere, but so much of it is fragmented and scattered across the internet. In an era where anything should be easy to find at a moment's notice, a simple site update somewhere along the way can render something lost to time… forever. This is an attempt to remedy that for myself and for you. By utilizing powerful, "future-proof" tools, this index seeks to establish a compounding knowledge base, utilizing tools that do a good bit of the "heavy lifting" automatically. ## Course Description In this endeavor, we will explore the principles and practices of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and various research methodologies. We will also dive into various philosophical questions regarding information stewardship, pattern recognition, knowledge acquisition, and critical thinking. You will gain practical skills for research using open source tools and techniques, based on my own toolbox and acquired experience over the last several years. ## Course Objectives 1. Eliminate the question "Where/how do I start?" from your bottlenecks in research. 2. Become familiar and comfortable with a suite of tools and methods that are fast, reliable, and replicable across many use cases. 3. Create your own Obsidian vault with templates and automations that consistently draw new connections you otherwise may have missed. Everything is structured. Everything has a hierarchy. ### Class Schedule & Itinerary Week 1 (Oct 8): Toolkit, overview, setting expectations. Intelligence Agencies vs. Forecasters. Week 2 (Oct 15): How to take notes that don't suck and automate (most) of the annoying stuff. Skill Acquisition: Obsidian or IDE information logging. Week 3 (Oct 22): Data collection, Recently-Deleted Protocol, & Archiving Week 4 (Oct 29): Data analytics for beginners. #### Week 1: Big Dig Academy Welcome Week **Date**: October 8, 2024 - Overview of OSINT Toolkit - (Videos and quick reads will be posted under Course Materials.) - Review syllabus - Expectations from the course - Who Would Win? The CIA or crowdsourced information gatherers? **Hint: It's not the CIA.** #### Week 2: Getting Started With Obsidian **Date:** October 15, 2024 - Information hierarchies & schema. - What is [[Zettelkasten]] and does that apply here? - YAML, Markdown, & other building blocks. - Plugins & standards of practice. - Templating & automations. - Linking Obsidian with an IDE for more powerful data analysis. - Data sanitation & standards. ![[Pasted image 20240930151603.png]] #### Week 3: Data Collection, Storage, & Archiving **Date:** October 22, 2024 - Pareto Principle and applying it to your research workflow. - Top five resources & methods. - Analytical frameworks to set priorities. - Archiving both online & locally. (Setting up an archive if you don't have one.) - How to pull recently-deleted web pages to relatively high success. #### Week 4: Data Analytics for Beginners ##### Recommended Reading: [[Tractatus Logico Philosophicus]] %%Footer Starts Here%% --- ![[Brain Icon 1.png|center]] <b><font color="#ffffff"> <center>You might not have noticed it… but your brain did.</center> </font></b> --- ### Tags ### Linked Pages & Footnotes