:@2023.10.07:pim:Update 2023-11-25: I’ve removed type tags. I wasn’t satisfied with them. It’s hard to maintain a consistent level of abstraction across all the types I come up with. Not a major loss.
I’m not prolific, but I like to take notes. About ideas I have, books and article I read, things I notice about myself and my relationships with others. I’ve long struggled to organize them. The best workflow for me is something directly on my computer’s storage: many folders, one file, give or take, per note or piece.
But designing a tree of nested folders requires imposing a hierarchy on the work, and the diversity of the work makes that difficult. Storing too many items in the same place is unwieldy. I can use programs to make things easier to find, but I want navigating the folders themselves to be tolerable. Storing only a few items in one place requires some relatively specific selection criterion. More specific criteria describe the piece less; multiple specific criteria can apply to one item at once.
Tags are a familiar solution. If an item can be described in multiple
ways, simply assign it multiple tags. This is compelling. I use dots
. to create a hierarchy of tags: I can have, say, a
journal.daily for the events of the day and a
journal.rock-climbing for tracking my strengths,
weaknesses, and relevant experiences. It can be nice for them both to
appear under journal.
Tags don’t map well to a digital or physical filesystem. If I draft
an essay that compares, say, snails to social anxiety, does it go in the
mollusks folder or the psychology folder? The
very strength of tags, calling something by all of its topics,
guarantees this problem.
I like my tags to double as metadata, i.e. the date something was
written, what type of writing it is, etc. A naive tag system can do this
only ambiguously: if I tag something essay, does that mean
it’s an essay or that it’s about the medium of essay? If I tag something
2021.09, does that mean it’s about the cultural patterns of
a particular group in September 2021 or that I wrote it then, forgetting
which day in particular?
My broad solution begins with identifying three classes of tags. Conflating them causes the problems above. The classes are:
=),@), andTopic tags are what we usually see, and therefore usually intend. The
snails tag means a piece is about snails. In my
disambiguated system, the 2021.09 topic tag means a piece
is about, not necessarily written in, September 2021.
Reification tags describe where and how a piece exists. These partly
help me unify my base of things without endless transcription. If I
spent an evening journaling on paper, I can create a digital item with a
tag @blue-paper-journal. That way, any programs I write or
use to manage my information have limited sight of my paper notes.
“Reification” is a rare word, but it suits this usage well. Consider a
note an abstract thing, simply a piece of information; then the computer
file that contains its text, or the paper that does, or an audio
recording of my voice, “reifies” it in matter or magnetism. The
@2021.09 reification tag (mind the @ prefix)
means a piece was written in September 2021.
Type is the fuzziest of these classes. A piece tagged
=essay (mind the = prefix) is an essay, not
necessarily a piece about the medium of essay. The key reason for type
tags is that, if I choose my types well and squint, each item has
exactly one type. There is a way to describe it, and once described,
there’s no other way to describe it at the same time. Because there’s
only one, I let type tags correspond to the file system. Other examples
I’ve used are =exposition, for expository writing, and
=poetry.
Choosing proper types is difficult. Most of what I store is text at
the end of the day, so =text would include everything. Do I
bump up one level to =english-writing? Do I bump up a few
(?) levels to =prose, or all the way up to
=essay? The challenge is to find a set of these type tags,
to be used for everything I store, that has a somewhat ‘flat’ level of
abstraction.
My chosen set will change over time. Already, I have a nice folder structure that I can navigate pretty quickly.