Finding a physical folksonomy for flimsy files

January 9, 2007 5:38 AM

Is there a way of tagging paper?

Is there a way of applying "folksonomy" (yuck, awful word) to physical paper? In other words, is there some robust method of labeling papers within a sheaf of printed material (such as a book or set of college notes) in a way analogous to "tagging"?

Specifically, I have a large set of printed and hand-written notes from college classes. They are all categorised appropriately, e.g. "human anatomy", "human physiology", "human pathology" and so on. However this has the same drawback as "folders" with email systems: one file can only exist in one folder, unless the whole file is duplicated. I'd like to be able to tag files and individual pages. Specific tags might include "hip" and "muscle", thus allowing me to rapidly locate anything to do with the muscles of the hip.

I'd like to find a tried-and-trusted method, although if anyone's got an idea about how to implement a system, feel free to post here (maybe we'll take it to chat if it gets convoluted). But I would prefer pointers to well-defined systems.

One question: am I actually looking for an indexing system? I would prefer a quick, robust, visually-oriented system that requires little maintenance.

I'm using docs.google.com to create and edit documents, and to tag them. So far so good. But I'd like something that I can apply to a physical bundle of papers.

I've searched MF and the web, but it's a tricky one to track down. "Physical tagging" and "physical folksonomy" yields lots of RFID and geotagging stuff, not what I'm after. Standard apology applies to anyone shrewd enough to find previous threads.

posted by ajp to technology (19 comments total)

Sounds like you're describing an index. First number all the pages. Then compile a list of keywords, followed by their page numbers.
posted by blue mustard at 5:43 AM on January 9, 2007 [1 favorite]

One partial solution would be to use various paper colours within the pile: e.g. all pages having to do with muscles on blue paper, all for hips on blue, etc. This would only allow one level of categorisation beyond the bundle, and would require either pre-planning for handwritten notes or photocopying onto the correct colour paper afterward, but different colour sheets are easy to spot and may even be a memory aid.

The more obvious solution is the law school standby of buying little tape flags in a range of colours (like these) and writing the tags on them.
posted by sueinnyc at 5:48 AM on January 9, 2007

Maybe you could hack up some variant of this?
posted by flabdablet at 5:51 AM on January 9, 2007

coloured post-it notes? There's quite a variety of colours and sizes you could get but my feeling on the matter is that i tend to end up with a favourite reference book on a topic, and use research particularly electronic journals via my university library, for anything else.

I've been thinking about creating a word document that is a giant index to everything I read and review (and write, and come across on the internet, or in paper form or even in conversation) which I can then create an updatable table of contents page for, and an index at the rear, but I don't know if it's actually worth it. By the time i need to re-refer to some material, it will probably be outdated and I can find new and more recent material pretty quickly.

It's a good question. I'm interested to see what results here.
posted by b33j at 5:53 AM on January 9, 2007

They sell these little colored tabs that can be written on and stick off the edge of the pages. Damned if I know what they're called, but I have a few.
posted by IronLizard at 5:56 AM on January 9, 2007

But then, what you're describing would require a lot of photocopies in multiple folder, on second thought.
posted by IronLizard at 5:58 AM on January 9, 2007

Thanks for the comments so far. My thoughts:

Coloured paper: Each sheet can only be one colour (realistically), so can only be tagged once. This would be pretty, but wouldn't really meet the criteria. Plus as you point out, it would be a lot of work and kill quite a few trees.

Coloured Post-It tags are something I've been mulling over. Ideally there would be one colour per tag, otherwise it might be difficult to find all instances of a single tag. Also, visualise the problem: a large lever-arch file, stuffed full of papers. There would be quite a few post-it tag tufts along the edge. Plus they'd kinda get in the way of the standard dividers. (Although... hmm, perhaps the tags could go along the top/bottom of the pages, leaving the sides for dividers, which is where they conventionally appear). I still like the post-it tag idea though.

The "notch card" is an interesting idea; it links to all sorts of stuff about hypertext prototypes. I'll definitely have a root around through all that.
posted by ajp at 6:04 AM on January 9, 2007

I may be missing the point, but the first thing I thought of was actually tagging them with the colored post-it flags others have mentioned. More than one tag can go on each piece of paper. That's what I did in grad school.
posted by misanthropicsarah at 6:07 AM on January 9, 2007

Oh, also, you can't put the post-it's all willy-nilly. Every 'tag' for hip has to go in the same place on the piece of paper, every 'tag' for muscle has to go in the same place, etc.
posted by misanthropicsarah at 6:08 AM on January 9, 2007

How about this? Tag your page with a post it note with a code which refers first to the document, then to the page number and finally to the subject. Then enter the details of your post it note in your database or even an excel spreadsheet so you can sort by of course, document, subject and notes on each occurence. (eg Bio101notes:page47:spleen). I think (on preview) because the post-it note is on the text book, it would probably only need to hold the subject rather than the text and page #.

If any page has more than one topic you wish to refer to, a large enough post it note can hold more references.

You could use this system to refer to electronic materials and also to books/journals you had to return to the library.
posted by b33j at 6:11 AM on January 9, 2007

Seems to me Blue Mustard has the simplest and most efficient method, an index.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 6:18 AM on January 9, 2007

One thing that narrows down the clutter of Post-It flags (even with more than one per page, where you need different colours) is to put them in descending order from one end to another of the page that is tagged (a bit like notches on a notched dictionary) so that you see a full page of tags at a time.

For example, if you had one tag per page on each of 10 pages, put the tag on page 1 at the top of the page, then the tag on page 2 slightly lower down so that the whole tag shows just below the first tag, when the pages are piled up, the page 3 tag just below that, etc. This takes a bit longer, but is helpful in the long run.
posted by sueinnyc at 6:19 AM on January 9, 2007

If you don't want a bunch of flappy tags sticking out, you could get a variety of color markers and put marks on the very edge of the paper (in the same spot on the page for each color) (or use color tape folded over the paper edge) so when leafing through you would see the color that meant "hip" and the color that meant "muscle". I've also just written down the side of the edge of the page what something is, like you'd write on a file folder...
posted by coevals at 6:25 AM on January 9, 2007

beej: That sounds like an indexing system, which may in fact be what I'm after. The detail sounds interesting but feels slightly more complex than I'm envisaging.

Post-It notes definitely seem intuitively to work here because they're quick and easy - the whole point of tagging.

The problem comes with the sheer amount of them. Imagine a lever-arch file full of paper: several hundred sheets. A sheet will belong to a booklet, and a booklet will belong to one of 5 categories, separated by dividers. The tags I envisage "layering" on top of this structure are to do with human anatomy (although that shouldn't restrict suggestions, I suppose). In my dream-world, I imagine picking up the lever-arch file, and looking for an intersection of tags, finding the intersection rapidly and visually, say by selecting all pages containing red, yellow and blue tags.

In the real world, I'm likely to have too many tags to distinguish them by colour. Perhaps there would be a way of organising my tags to reduce this into some manageable number. This seems like a problem of "hierarchical folksonomy", which I shall have to investigate :-) The final system must not be unwieldy in any way, it has to enable rapid searching and indexing.

An index does seem like a sensible suggestion. Either way, perhaps this is actually a problem of information organisation and retrieval?

(Is this thread getting too chatty? I really did think there would be a well-known system that was out there already).
posted by ajp at 6:38 AM on January 9, 2007

One way to simplify an indexing system is to index larger units than a single page. So for example, I do my indexes at the article level.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 7:04 AM on January 9, 2007

This may not be practical for what you want to do...but back in the pre-computer days, there was a way of doing stuff like this involving index cards.

Basically, you started off with blank cards that had holes punched near one edge. The area between the hole and the edge was perforated. You would write a note on a card, and then you would assign it to a category by tearing out the barrier between the hole and the edge of the sheet. (Basically transforming it from an "o" to a "U," not a hole anymore, but a chunk taken out of the edge.)

Each hole represented a category, which you assigned for an entire deck of cards. If you wanted to mark a card as part of a category, you didn't rip that hole's border. This allowed you to pull cards out by sticking a bent paper clip or other implement into a hole, and gently tugging to separate those cards from the stack.

I'm not sure if this explanation is going to make sense, so I'll give an example. Suppose I have cards with three holes, which I assign to mean "Dogs," "Cats," and "Bears." Then I write some information on a card, e.g.: 'Polar bears have black skin.' Because this is about bears, I rip out the barriers near the 'Dog' and 'Cat' holes, in order to deselect them. Then I file the card in the stack. If I want to retrieve all the cards about Bears, all I have to do (with the cards oriented similarly -- one corner is cut to ensure this) is stick a paperclip in through the 'Bear' hole, and pull gently upwards. The bear cards will be pulled out of the stack, and the other cards will not.

It's been years since I've seen any pre-punched cards for doing this, but I think it used to be pretty common. (Bonus points if anyone can give me more information on it!) There's no reason why this sort of manual sorting only works on punchcards; you could probably do it with sheets of paper as well. You'd just need to figure out a way to make the holes. The major downside of this system is that it's not flexible; you need to decide on a set number of categories before you begin, but it does let you assign more than one category to a single piece of information, and perform simple Boolean searches (by searching and then searching the results for AND, or searching and looking at the cards that fall out for NOT).
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:14 AM on January 9, 2007 [1 favorite]

Kadin2048: trawling Wikipedia leads to an article discussing exactly what you describe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge-notched_card
posted by ajp at 9:47 AM on January 9, 2007

Uh yeah, trawling Wikipedia from a link that flabdablet posted leads to... a link that flabdablet posted. I went round in circles in there.
posted by ajp at 10:29 AM on January 9, 2007

I use post-it flags on mine in ways mostly described here already. Colour-coded by overall topic, subtopics posted in different locations down the side of the page. Colour-coding was easier when I put two flags, one right above the other, giving greater depth of combinations possible (sometimes I just used random two-colour combinations, sometimes I used a main colour plus other sub-colours). You can get a shit-load of information on there very quickly. I also then wrote sub-tags onto each post-it flag, so I can get out all the apple/human health ones then flip through quickly to find the 2D-gel papers, as an example.

Volume isn't an issue, I currently have three (huge) full lever arch files, six half-height file boxes (those ones go into manilla folders for bunching and are much more accessible than the lever arch ones) and one full full-height file box. Oh, and two smaller ringbinders. The trick is to use plastic post-it flags rather than notes. They're thin, reasonably small and don't stick out too much.

This all works even better when backed up with a computer indexing system and much of this information is cross-referenced in user-defined fields in my endnote library. So I can do a search in endnote for key words or authors or whatever then go and physically find the paper. Endnote also assigns unique record numbers to each reference added and I know some people who use that as a an additional filing system. I.e. write the number on the paper, file in order within a box, write numbers on the outside of the box - papers can be mixed up a little but by marking what is in each box or folder you can retrieve them pretty quickly.

There are also a few often used papers which I have in there twice as they cover a couple of different areas. Usually they're in the 'current work' file and have an archive copy in their subject area. But by tagging different topics in different physical locations (e.g. IBD papers get flags at the top, statistics papers get flags half way down) you can fairly easily have a paper listed as belonging to more than one subject area.

All my flags are pretty fluorescent colours. Colour coding and adding tags makes the folders look really cool (I've had comments) and feels kind of like an art project which makes it all fun. It works too, I'm currently writing two different lit reviews and organising two other types of experimental plans and am keeping on top of the literature reasonably well.
posted by shelleycat at 1:56 PM on January 9, 2007 [1 favorite]