Explain the problem as you see it
As a team of biology researchers, we want to free-associate unstructured text, images, and drawings alongside our text nodes and supertagged nodes, using a free-form visual layout. We found ourselves continually drawing on a digital whiteboard side-by-side with the graph, and pasting in static images of content that was duplicated on the whiteboard, and once on the whiteboard that content was no longer editable, queryable, or connectable to other content.
Why is this a problem for you?
Because we are visual thinkers and learners, a diagrammatic/whiteboard type of playground is very important for us to input ideas and freely structure and restructure them as we go along. A visual representation that mixes images and nodes allows us to create a path (or diverging paths) from one node to the next, allows us to make new connections between nodes, and overlay our own "spatial coordinate system" specific to the task.
For example, If the task is to outline a research proposal, we'll include diverging paths depending on the outcome of a given experiment. If the task is to collect knowledge that informs the working model of a biological process, then we will include a drawing of the diagram alongside questions related to each element of the diagram.
Suggest a solution
We recently built an open-source canvas plugin for Roam Research that has these capabilities! It allows us to integrate freehand drawings, text, and shapes alongside content from the graph (nodes, pages, and the equivalent of supertagged nodes). It is built as a "canvas" option in the "query builder" roam research plugin: https://github.com/RoamJS/query-builder
David Vargas built this canvas on top of tldraw (similar to logseq's whiteboard) as part of his discourse graph plugin. We think it would be useful for visual thinkers of many types. Some of our favorite features include
select a given node type (supertag) to add
add an existing node of a specific type
create a new node of a specific type
connect nodes
After talking with @Lukas/CortexFutura this morning, we think that a canvas like this is the only remaining feature that would be necessary for us to move our lab graph over from Roam.
If useful, we'd be happy for you to take freely from the plugin linked above, and we can share any lessons from the development of the canvas (which took approximately 30-40 hours of Vargas's time spread over 2 months or so).