I'll add Cataloging the World, by Alex Wright and Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 by Markus Krajewski plus few relatively recent articles:
There are surely many others and following those we arrive to classic PIM publications, witch is "the system to organize personal digital information" in the end!
Thanks for these insights and listing these alternatives in one place and showing their commonalities (like tagging, hierarchies, and parsing/subdividing). One book I have found interesting along those lines is "The Discipline of Organizing".
https://berkeley.pressbooks.pub/tdo4p/
Tangentially, William Kent's "Data and Reality" (the first two editions especially) also explores the larger meta-issues of moving from human-ish nuanced thinking to more limited formal representations (i.e. "The map is not the territory").
http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm
I have my own FOSS explorations to make software related to these sorts of themes called Pointrel/Twirlip -- but still a work in progress after over forty years. Indirectly Pointrel did in a sense help inspire Wordnet though. :-) And Wordnet was core to the rise of Google (via Adsense) which claims to want to organize the world's information (even if they may have other goals as well).
I'll add Cataloging the World, by Alex Wright and Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 by Markus Krajewski plus few relatively recent articles:
- Note Taking as an Art of Transmission http://doi.org/10.1086/427303
- From Note-Taking to Data Banks https://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2010.492615
- Facing Interfaces: Paul Otlet's Visualizations of Data Integration https://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/images/e/e2/Heuvel_Rayward_F...
There are surely many others and following those we arrive to classic PIM publications, witch is "the system to organize personal digital information" in the end!