Ask HN: How do you organize information: by type or context?

3 points by brslv 5 years ago | 9 comments

Here's a simple example.

You read a book about human's brain and find something particularly interesting that you'd like to remember.

You open your notetaking app of choice and are presented with the following dilemma: to put the quote in a folder called "quotes" or in a folder called "humans-brain". What do you do?

I'm particularly interested in the topic of organizing information and would be grateful if you could share any resources on the topic "type vs context" or simply share your point of view and experience.

AnimalMuppet 5 years ago |

I'd probably have a folder called "humans-brain", and within that a file called "quotes". I care more what the information is about, and less what the meta-data about the data is (what type of info it is). Why? Because I more often want to find information about a topic than I do to find information of a particular type.

brslv 5 years ago | |

This is exactly what I'd do as well. But let's think in a more broader terms. For example in my house we organize good by type. Fruits go in one place, meat in another, milk and milk products in third etc. But, isn't a context-oriented organization more reasonable? Food for breakfast goes in one place, food for dinner in another etc.?

dvxvd 5 years ago | | |

Food is real and has physical appearance.. digital object they are virtual. So, you need to develop virtual organisation.. unfortunately don't know how ;)

simonblack 5 years ago | | |

C'mon now.

You've never had a bowl of breakfast cereal at 10PM?

<grin>

simonblack 5 years ago |

Always by type in a tree-structure of directories. By the time you've selected down finer and finer details you'll probably find you've only got a dozen or so files left to search carefully through for your information.

But, mind you, belt-n-braces. It never hurts to have a key-word index too.

dvxvd 5 years ago |

For me this question is open for a few decades.. one of the possible solutions are - tags

But im expecting classification to be done by some personal AI system. Latter system must be able extract this data on demand.

brslv 5 years ago | |

Think of my question in a more generic terms. Here's another example in the context of software development. Do you have a place in your codebase for all of your controllers, another for all of the models etc? Or do you prefer to have users folder with controllers and models subfolders etc.?

dvxvd 5 years ago | | |

Having all controllers in one place never worked for me. Exception are: models and global services ànd helpers.. All the rest is kind of module grouped. And usually modules are dictated by use cases. Users, transactions, function1, function 2... Dont afraid to copy paste code in multiple places. Once it will mature and you will get clarity on functionality you will make it global or semi global and stop asking where to store it. If you don't know, then likely you need more time to think about it ;)

Of course i admit that always there are situations when you feel sorry for naming it bad.. i.e. db table names.. but thats called expirience.. more years you spent on coding more abstract and proper name you will give to you class, folder, component, table, module and etc..

pier25 5 years ago |

The idea of folders rooted in the physical world is obsolete.

Use a system with tags so you don't have to chose one or the other.