I’m new at this, so forgive me if I’m sounding like a silver surfer who just discovered that ink cartridges cost more than the remarkably cheap printers they just bought, but lying in bed after only 4 hour’s sleep on Xmas morn, my hyper mind’s been currently obsessing on this: that writing a weblog’s making me think a lot about categorisation, and dangers of allowing post-hoc changes later. I suppose what librarians of the more ghastly kind who get fed up stacking shelves call “information choreography”. This is all rather beside the real point of this weblog, but think of it as laying out your pencils in a row before an exam I guess, and stretching your fingers before starting.
So don’t read this if you’re here to read about illness, gender or God. This is a sidenote, some chatter before I start.
It’s the post-hoc thing that concerns me most. You can’t reformat and recategorise paper diaries long after the ink’s dry, which may not be such a bad thing. On starting this thing, I’m tempted to create a lot of categories, and sub-categories, in which I can file entries multiply; so, say, this article might be filed under a master category “information”, a sub-category “technofear”, and also under another master category “blogging”. I might do this with a year’s worth of articles. Then one day I might feel that, given that I only have six articles under “technofear”, and the only ones I remember are about how people irrationally fear cloning, I’ll just rename the category “irrationality” and file it under a master category “belief”. Now, clearly I can review what’s in it, but you can imagine given a few permutations, it’ll get out of hand, beyond the pale and altogether not altogether.

Continue reading Grep works. →