Tagging structure

• wbox
  • Are tags necessary? Andy says they’re weak, broad associations between files and they ultimately allow one to just see a big list of like files. In contrast, Zettelkasten advocates for use of “indexes”, high-signal compilations of notes or sources related to a specific topic where only the most important notes/sources are linked. This gives a strong entry point to key points for the topic, and then the user relies on internal links from there on out.
  • https://zettelkasten.de/posts/object-tags-vs-topic-tags/
    • Tags aren’t good long term organizational objects. Tags get caught up in lots of files that often don’t have the strong connection to the topic we desire. Eventually, with enough notes, viewing a tag to find the right note becomes sifting through a long list of hundreds of files, a very complicated and annoying process. Here the author highlights the difference between tagging goals:
      1. Tags for topics: tags for grouping notes around a topic
      2. Tags for objects: tags for grouping notes around an object Topic tags get tons of files under its umbrella, whereas object tags are far more specific tags that are only related directly to that thing. For example, the topic tag “statistics” would be used in tons of files like confidence intervals, Bayes rule, etc, whereas an object tag “central limit theorem” would only include files specifically related to the CLT.
  • https://zettelkasten.de/posts/three-layers-structure-zettelkasten/
    • As a follow up to the previous article, the author introduces “structure notes”, more or less tables of contents of related zettels. These are more or less outline notes as we saw with Andy’s system, where we take zettels and build out the necessary pieces of a topic. These also serve as useful pillars to define some structure in an otherwise “meshy” network of a system.
    • In accordance with the above point and about outline notes in general, if we were to fully embrace this, one could derive a note’s tags by those outline notes to which it belongs. That is, a note’s tags are those (likely) more general topics which include the current note as a part of its hierarchical outline. This could offer the benefit that comes with outline notes (pre-emptively piecing together writing outlines) while avoid the long-term cluster of tagging files with generic topics.

I think most of the points here just relate to formalizing the System note types and brushing up pipelines. Outline/structure notes are clearly an important part of managing higher level ideas, and can help build the ground work for more useful “tagging” by linking to the most relevant and important starting points of a topic.

• Tagging, kind of a hard problem (how to replicate Notion fields, types, etc and integration with Pelican?),