Image Occlusion with Ankivalenz
Image occlusion is a useful technique to create spaced repetition cards from an image. Cards are created by hiding different parts of the image and using the name of the hidden part as the answer, and a single image can easily result in 10s of cards. Image occlusion seems to be especially popular with medicine students who have to remember the names of endless bones (206, to be precise), but it is a technique that is useful beyond that.
I use my tool Ankivalenz to generate Anki cards from structured Markdown notes, and even though I did not know about image occlusion when I first built Ankivalenz, its syntax does a wonderful job of enabling image occlusion. Here is how to do it:
First, you find the image that you want to create cards from. It could be something like this, a diagram representing part of the gene regulation involved in the transcription of the lac gene:
Say I want to remember that the transcription begins when a repressor is removed from the DNA strand by an inducer. In that case I would hide the corresponding labels and replace them with an identifier. This identifier can be e.g. a number, a letter or a colored box. I use CleanShot X, an excellent macOS screenshot tool, which has a feature to easily add lettered labels. This is what I end up with:
Next, I create a Markdown note (in this case using a WYSIWYG editor) like this:
I take advantage of the fact that Ankivalenz will add any ancestral list items and headers to the card, including any images, so I do not need to insert the image multiple times, but can create two list items below the image, each creating a card with the identifier on the front and the label on the back. This is what the first card looks like in Anki:
That’s it. For a general introduction to Ankivalenz, check out the documentation on GitHub.