BFTP: A folder mindset in a tagging world
Saturday, May 3, 2014 at 06:37AM Johnson's Law of Searching:
It's always easier to find something than to find it again.
A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system. On a website in which many users tag many items, this collection of tags becomes a folksonomy. - Wikipedia
Doug Jamison at Geezer's online wrote about the impact of search engines on traditional organizational structures in his Front Page for Everything entry:
The personal computer and online databases started the erosion, then Gopher, Archie, BBS's, usenet, and the web. But the search engine was the giant killer. It made all previous information-organizing structures seem cumbersome and restrictive.
The entry struck a nerve with me - and not just because I too am a geezer. I am in the process of shifting from using the folder and subfolder organizational struture of Outlook/Entourage to the tagging system of Gmail for tracking my saved e-mails.
And I am nervous.
I'm not sure why I should be other than the fact that for many I have lived and died on the ability to retrieve specific e-mails using a filing system. E-mails that contained things like flight reservations. Like price quotes. Like writing deadlines. Little things like that.
And I've taught people how to organize their own files using folders and subfolders for as long as I have been teaching teachers how to use computers. I used to bring in real file folders as visual aids in workshops. (Just like in your real file cabinet, your hard drive can hold folders. And you can put a folder inside another folder. Everything does NOT have to stay on your desktop.)
Now, whenever I see a computer desktop that looks like this on a teacher's machine in our district, I consider it a personal failure:
Have the "dump everything in one place" people been the organizes ones? Due to tagging and full-text searching using OSX's Spotlight, Google, and other powerful indexing/search tools, I seem to have been wasting my time and effort carefully filing my documents - and teaching others to categorize and sort as well.
Shudder.
It's now a simple matter to save everything in a "Documents" folder morass and then use the Genie of the Find Command to quickly summon just those works with key tags or phrases. Easier and more effective, I admit, than trying to remember the name of folders and subfolders and documents.
But I can't help but think that we are losing a something as well - the ability to think in terms of categories and hierarchies and abstraction ladders ala S.I. Hayakawa. Knowing how to move up and down the abstraction ladder easily: Living things -> animals -> birds -> penguins -> Tacky.
from Language in Thought and Action, by S.I. Hayakawa
Tagging and full-text searching seem just one small example of technology relieving us of the need to think for ourselves, to come up with ways of organizing our thoughts and our world. Of exercising our gray matter a bit.
Or maybe such a thought is simply my geezer-itis flaring up.
A weekend Blue Skunk "feature" will be a revision of an old post. I'm calling this BFTP: Blast from the Past. Original post March 31, 2009. This post still resonates with me whenever I create a new folder in GoogleDrive or Evernote....
Reader Comments (2)
For me, the trouble with tagging is remembering what I used as a tag for similar posts, bookmarks, etc. While some systems populate the tag suggestion box according to the text of my post, many leave me to the vecancies of my own mind...which is not such a reliable filing system, I'm afraid. Which tags would I use for this post? Maybe "tag" but "tagging" or "tags" would also be appropriate, so do I put all 3, and then search for all three when I'm searching my tags? Though I guess in this case, truncation would work: "tag*" I know: I'll create an alphabetized spreadsheet of my tags and keep it in a folder entitled "Tag*" What a mess.
I suppose it is cold comfort, but it's sort of relief that a far younger mind than mine struggles with this too!
Doug