📰 - A Complete Guide to Tagging for Personal Knowledge Management (Forte Labs 2019)
Summary
Tags help add context across notes, but they can easily be misused and add complexity to a system. Tags are best used to track action, status and type, not content.
Highlights:
Tags as Virtual Spaces
- they help us to perceive, to choose, and to think about novel groupings of data on the fly. But crucially, to do these things to facilitate action, not just abstract thought.
- Tagging notes across different notebooks allows us to perceive cross-disciplinary themes and patterns that defy simple categorization. Tagging all the notes we want to review for a project could make our choices easier, by creating a boundary around the information we’ll consider before taking action. And tagging notes according to which stage of a project they are best suited for can improve our thinking by allowing us to focus on only the most relevant information for the given moment.
- Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark describes “simple labeling” (or tags) as a kind of “augmented reality trick.” With the simple act of assigning labels to things, we invite the brain’s pattern recognition ability to identify their similarities and thereby predict what other items would fit the label too
Tags for Knowledge Lifecycle
- I believe that what is needed for tagging to fulfill its potential while remaining feasible is to change its function: from labeling the “conceptual meaning” of bits of knowledge (which is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and fragile), to tracking its lifecycle
- Knowledge Lifecycle:
- Identifying knowledge
- Capturing knowledge
- Verifying knowledge
- Interpreting knowledge
- Organizing knowledge
- Categorizing knowledge
- Disseminating knowledge
- Combining knowledge
- Creating knowledge
- Using knowledge
- Re-evaluating knowledge
- Horn and his collaborators identified 40 types of information blocks that could be categorized as one of seven types:
- Procedure
- Process
- Concept
- Structure
- Classification
- Principle
- Fact
- Decades of research in this field have shown that the best use for labels is as an output mechanism, not an input mechanism.
1. Tag notes according to the actions taken or deliverables created with them
- By action – What actions have you taken (or will you take) with this note?
- Tags for [reviewed] and [added], for tracking which notes have been reviewed for a deliverable, and which have been incorporated into it
- By deliverable – What have you used (or will you use) this note to deliver?
- Tags that designate the kind of information a note contains, such as [content], [admin], and [meeting notes]
- By stage of your knowledge lifecycle – Which stage is this note currently in (or does it best belong to)?
- Tags that track the status of notes through a workflow, such as [inactive], [active], [next], and [completed]
- One of the uses of kanban cards was to track an item through the factory regardless of which machines it passed through, in what order, and at what speed. Each item was “tagged” with its current state, so there was never any doubt as to how it should be handled
2. Add structure slowly, in stages and only as needed, using accumulated material to guide you in what structures are needed
3. Tag notes according to their internal, external, and social context, and status
- Internal context includes the thoughts, feelings, associations, concerns, and considerations you have about a note
- External context includes the other items that you are dealing with while interacting with a note, such as other notes, documents, folders, or apps
- Social context refers to other people who are related to the note, such as project collaborators, the person who recommended the source, or who it was shared with
- Current status refers to any actions taken with the note, or any deliverables it was used in
4. Develop customized, profession-specific taxonomies
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Aristotle believed that knowledge could be classified according to its substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, & passion. Francis Bacon categorized all human knowledge into memory (i.e. history), reason (i.e. philosophy), and imagination (i.e. fine arts). The 20th century Indian librarian Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan argued that any document could be defined according to its personality, matter, energy, space, and time.
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In the 1960s and 1970s, IBM conducted a series of experiments with their new Storage and Information Retrieval System (STAIRS), one of the first systems in which the computer could search the entire text of documents. They found that search accuracy could run as high as 75 to 80%. They happily proclaimed the “death of meta-data.”
📰 - A Complete Guide to Tagging for Personal Knowledge Management (Forte Labs 2019)
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Summary
Highlights:
Tags as Virtual Spaces
Tags for Knowledge Lifecycle
1. Tag notes according to the actions taken or deliverables created with them
2. Add structure slowly, in stages and only as needed, using accumulated material to guide you in what structures are needed
3. Tag notes according to their internal, external, and social context, and status
4. Develop customized, profession-specific taxonomies