Vocabulary and terminology section for book notes page in notion
In chapter 8 of his book "How to Read a Book", Mortimer Adler explains how discovering the relation between the author’s vocabulary and terminology is one way to increase your understanding of a book. To achieve this, he suggests locating the keywords and important terms within the book and noting them down into a two-column list, where one column contains the important words, and the other contains their important meanings (terms). He also explains that every word can have many important terms, and every term can have many keywords.
In Notion, I have a book notes database for taking notes on each book I read. Within the book notes page template, I added a simple two-column table with a header row for the Vocabulary and Terminology section:
It's simple and easy to fill out while reading. But since a single word can be found in many books, and since the fun thing about Notion is to connect everything that’s related, I thought it would be better to turn this simple table into a Vocabulary and Terminology database with all the words and terms I capture from all the books I read. And do so in such a way that, within the book notes page, I can only view the keywords and important terms related to the particular book I'm reading.
So I created a single database for words and terms with the following properties:
- Type (select) options:
WordorTerm - Words (relation: this database. no limit. related property enabled: Terms)
- displays words related to a term
- Terms (relation: this database. no limit. related property enabled: Words)
- displays terms related to a word
- Book notes (words) (relation: book notes database. two-way. no limit.)
- displays the book where a word is found
- Book notes (terms) (relation: book notes database. two-way. no limit.)
- displays the book where a term is found
In the book notes template, I created a database view with this filter:
- Where
book notes (words)→ contains →book notes template
And I set the visible properties:
- Title (name of page)
- Terms (relation: this database)
That way, the database view in the book notes page displays only words that are related to the book and their related terms. The only problem is that the terms relation property displays all the terms related to the particular word, including terms unrelated to the particular book on the book notes page.
I tried a different approach, where I created separate databases, one for words and one for terms, related them to each other, and related each of them to the book notes database. I created a filtered database view in the book notes page to show only words that are related to the book and their related terms. Still, the terms relation property shows terms unrelated to the particular book on the book notes page.
My goal is to have a database view in each book note page that only shows the words and terms found within the particular book I'm taking notes on. Is there a way to filter the relation property to show only the terms related to the particular book I’m reading? If not, what should I do differently?
I hope this wasn't too confusing. I'm not much of a Notion expert. But if you are, how would you create this?