Tacking Noguchi Shelving onto Tinderbox
Wednesday, July 29, 2009 at 7:59PM TEKKA's Journal Project taught me a range of techniques that I subsequently applied to my Tinderbox journals: zebra striping, the metaphor of prototypes representing pre-printed journal paper, timestamping… This article is my means of paying back the favour: by documenting an extension to my Tinderbox journal that I call my "Noguchi shelf." (The Noguchi filing method was ostensibly devised by Yukio Noguchi; you can read about it here.)
Background
One of my journals, the one I call my Career Daybook, has developed into a real hybrid: a professional networking logbook beside nascent inventions and innovation descriptions with ideas for blogging and research and development projects flowing into my blog-writing and archiving system. (Whew!)
Why keep all these different things in one place? Interconnectedness. They're all related to my career, my ideas, my career contacts, information I want to develop.
The idea-development and blog-writing parts of my daybook consist of a hierarchy representing the general categories under which I write:
- Commentary about improving the world
- Using knowledge tools
- Reviewing knowledge creation tools
- Information retrieval and organisational tools
- Analysing the way the world works (analytical tools in action)
- People in social settings: Applied psychology, interpersonal skills and know-how
- Fine Knowledge Tools
- Open research projects
- Textual Analysis for Tinderbox
- Innovations
- Professional Practice Notes
These categories bound the topic areas of my blog. The notes beneath these headings represent potential articles. I consider notes descending from the articles themselves to be contained by the article. When I publish an article, it is removed from its conceptual location and placed in the Published container.
Headings are permanent. Articles transitory. Headings, only headings, are colored black.
The Noguchi Concept
If you resisted the urge to read Mark Patterson's description of the Noguchi filing method, here's my quick summary: Noguchi filing is about placing related papers in an envelope and storing it on a shelf. Whenever you place your envelope on the shelf, you place it on the left. Search for your paper: start at the left and work rightwards, stop when you've located it, use the notes, replace them in the envelope and replace the envelope on the left of the shelf.
Mark Patterson's summary:
The brilliance of the system is in its simplicity. It automatically sorts by need without any thought on my part. It automatically "tells" me which projects are either stale or complete because they move to the right, and which projects are "hot" because they are furthest to the left. It reduces time hunting for files both when filing away, or when searching for files. It removes the need to have "absolute" categorization, since you are not filing or searching by category, you are merely looking for a file left-to-right. It saves space, since all my active files are in one space and not arrayed in stacks on my desk.
Constructing the shelf
Organisational freedom flows from digitisation, for digitised products can be sorted numerous ways. Instead of adopting the Noguchi filing system, I simply tacked an extra shelf onto my tinderbox—to better enjoy my kindling.
My Noguchi shelf is implemented by three entities:
- an agent, Noguchi shelf
- a prototype, NoguchiShelfItem
- an outline, displaying the results of the Noguchi shelf agent
The agent
The Noguchi shelf agent has a Query and an OnAdd action. The Query looks like this:
(descendedFrom(inventions)|descendedFrom(Publication queue))&$Color!=black&$Color(parent)==black
which means:
- descendedFrom(inventions)|descendedFrom(Publication queue)—only look in these two specific places
- $Color!=black—find notes that are not black; remember, black notes are "headings," and I'm looking for articles
- $Color(parent)==black—find notes that have a parent color of black, because I'm only looking for immediate children of a heading; I want to see articles, not contextless sub-points, on my Noguchi shelf
The agent sorts by the last date modified, most recent first. (The left-hand side of my Noguchi shelf lies at the top!)
The OnAdd Action is pretty simple.
$Prototype=NoguchiShelfItem
All items identified as belonging to my Noguchi shelf are given a prototype of type NoguchiShelfItem.
The prototype
The prototype consists of a single rule that implements time-based coloring.
if ($Modified>"today-1 hour") {$Color="darkest 7"}
else {if ($Modified>"yesterday") {$Color="dark 7"}
else {if ($Modified>"today-7") {$Color="7"}
else {if ($Modified>"today-30") {$Color="light 7"}
else {if ($Modified>"today-90") {$Color="lighter 7"}
else {if ($Modified>"today-1 year") {$Color="lightest 7"}
else {$Color="lightest 1"}}}}}};
And, yes, colors 1 and 7 do come from the award-winning Sandy color set.
The outline
My category-driven outline is arrayed on the left-hand side of my screen. My Noguchi shelf runs down the right. I typically write my articles—as I am writing this one—in a window in-between.
The experience
I casually cast my eyes to the right and glide down the carefully graduated colors delimiting the recency of my proto-articles and then switch gaze to the left, studying the juxtaposition of concepts filed under knowledge creation tools with those promising to explicate human practices.
It's better than "having it your way;" digitality allows "having it both ways."
;)
Snapshot of my Career Daybook, displaying categorical organisation in the left pane and the time-sorted Noguchi shelf on the right. (Click for larger image.)
Also see: Noguchi Bonus Pack
Many thanks to Mark Bernstein for correcting my idiosyncratic notion of the semantics of agent actions.
Daybook, Noguchi filing system, Noguchi shelf, Tinderbox in Innovation
Reader Comments (7)
I bet a screen shot would really help communicate this!
Yes, you're right. Okay, I bit: screenshot is now up.
I agree. The image helps a lot.
Having managed my data in Journler and then in DEVONThink I’ve chucked the lot of info manager applications and deployed an organization approach for all my notes using just the file system. There is a touch of Noguchi’s philosophy in the criticality of chronology to the system, augmented by a few good coding systems.
I write about it here...File System Infobase Manager
It feels rather liberating being unhitched from the constriction of an applications requirements.
Doug
www.dougist.com
The new Timeline features in the latest versions of Tinderbox would be useful here. Visualize the shelf.
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