For whatever reason, I recently became obsessed with the idea of building a personal database for movies and shows I have watched or want to watch. I guess it just falls into my habit of wanting to refine systems for managing things that don’t matter while I let the important aspects of life fall apart 🙃
Regardless, I’ve finally started experimenting with the Dataview plugin for Obsidian, something I’d installed long ago and hadn’t touched. It’s pretty cool! Combined with Obsidian Web Clipper (and time I should be spending on other things) I now have a system that takes movie/show metadata from IMDb and formats it into a Markdown note with metadata.
Dataview implements its own “Dataview Query Language” that is fairly similar to SQL, allowing you to do some pretty fun things within an Obsidian note. The output of a query can be rendered as bulleted lists, tables, tasks, or a calendar. A query like this
TABLE genre, creator, year, starring, rating, watched, favorite
FROM #Movie
WHERE icontains(starring, "cage")
SORT rating DESCmight return a result like this. (The links won’t work because they’re relative to my local vault, but you get the idea.)
| File (3) | genre | creator | year | starring | rating | watched | favorite |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adaptation. | - Comedy - Drama | - Spike Jonze | 2003 | - Nicolas Cage - Meryl Streep - Chris Cooper | 7.7 | false | false |
| Pig | - Drama - Mystery | - Vanessa Block - Michael Sarnoski | 2021 | - Nicolas Cage - Alex Wolff - Adam Arkin | 6.9 | false | false |
| Longlegs | - Crime - Horror - Thriller | - Osgood Perkins | 2024 | - Maika Monroe - Nicolas Cage - Blair Underwood | 6.6 | false | false |
Obviously, not all notes will be as nicely structured as ones that get generated by the Web Clipper, but I love that Dataview so easily extends Obsidian’s functionality into the realm of pseudo-database, capable of generating different views of your information. Also, it’s considerably more practical than Obsidian’s built-in search for presenting information as lists, meaning you can use it to tabulate all kinds of things with the addition of some tags or metadata here and there.
Again, it’s an extremely powerful system that would be great for someone who’s stable and well-adjusted enough in life to want to organize all of their thoughts (i.e. not me), but I’m a sucker for finding ways to automate things. I think, in some ways, this might be the aspect of software that I find most compelling: making everyday, repetitive tasks more efficient for people. In other words, the goal is efficiency, but really only in improving someone’s enjoyment of an activity. There’s probably a piece of insight here that’ll lead me to a career epiphany or something.