Have you ever noticed how much mental energy we spend just trying to put things in the right boxes? I was looking at my phone the other day, trying to decide if a certain app belonged in the productivity folder or the utility folder, and I realized I was having a minor existential crisis over a digital icon. It is a strange kind of friction, isn't it? That moment where your brain stalls because an object does not perfectly fit the mental map you have built for your life.
Herman Poppleberry here, and Corn, that is the human condition in a nutshell. We are obsessed with order because the alternative is chaos, and the human brain is simply not wired to handle unmediated chaos. Today’s prompt from Daniel is a deep dive into the history of taxonomy as a field, focusing specifically on information architecture and organization. It is such a foundational topic because it is not just about where we put things, it is about how we understand the world itself. When we categorize, we are not just tidying up, we are defining reality.
It is interesting that Daniel brought this up because we usually think of taxonomy in the context of biology, you know, the whole kingdom, phylum, class, order thing we learned in school. I remember memorizing King Philip Came Over For Good Soup just to keep the hierarchy straight. But Daniel is pointing us toward the digital realm, SQL databases, content management systems, and how we structure the massive amounts of data we are generating every second. It feels like we have moved from classifying beetles to classifying every single click and heartbeat.
Exactly. Taxonomy is essentially the practice and science of classification. The word itself comes from the Greek taxis, meaning arrangement, and nomia, meaning method. And while Carl Linnaeus is the big name everyone remembers from the seventeen hundreds for biological classification, the roots go back much further. Aristotle was trying to categorize the world over two thousand years ago. He was looking at physical characteristics to group animals, but he was also trying to categorize logic and poetry. He believed that by naming the parts of a thing, you could understand its essence.
But Aristotle’s system was pretty limited, right? I mean, he grouped things based on whether they had red blood or not, or if they lived on land or in the water. It was very binary.
It was, but it set the stage for the next two millennia. Before Aristotle, you had people like Callimachus at the Library of Alexandria in the third century before the common era. He created the Pinakes, which was essentially the first library catalog. He did not just list the books, he categorized them by genre, like rhetoric, law, epic, and tragedy. He even included a brief biographical sketch of the authors. This was the birth of metadata. He realized that a pile of scrolls is useless if you cannot find the specific thought you are looking for.
So we have been fighting this battle against the "pile of scrolls" for a long time. But then we hit the Enlightenment, and things got much more rigorous. That is where Linnaeus comes in, right?
Yes, Carl Linnaeus and his Systema Naturae in seventeen thirty-five. He introduced binomial nomenclature, the two-part naming system we still use today, like Homo sapiens. But more importantly, he created a nested hierarchy. He realized that nature is not just a flat list, it is a series of containers within containers. This was a massive leap in information architecture. It allowed scientists across the globe to speak the same language. If you found a flower in Sweden and I found one in France, we could use his taxonomy to determine if they were the same species. It was the first global standard for data.
It sounds like he was the original database administrator. But as we moved into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the sheer volume of human knowledge started to explode. We moved from classifying the natural world to classifying the world of ideas.
That is where the library sciences really took off. You cannot talk about taxonomy without mentioning Melvil Dewey. In eighteen seventy-six, he created the Dewey Decimal System. Before Dewey, libraries often organized books by the date they were acquired or even by the color of their spine. It was a nightmare for researchers. Dewey’s genius was using a decimal system to represent subjects. Every subject got a number between zero hundred and nine hundred and ninety-nine. It was a universal language for the organization of human thought.
I remember the smell of those old card catalogs. But Dewey’s system had some serious flaws, didn't it? It was very rigid. If a book was about both history and sociology, the librarian had to make a choice. It could only live in one physical spot on the shelf.
That is the "physicality trap" of traditional taxonomy. In the physical world, an object can usually only be in one place at one time. This led to the work of S.R. Ranganathan in the nineteen thirties. He was an Indian mathematician and librarian who realized that the world was becoming too complex for simple hierarchies. He developed what we call faceted classification. Instead of one big tree, he thought of information as having different faces or facets. A book could have a subject facet, a language facet, a time facet, and an author facet.
That sounds much more like how we think today. It is like the difference between a folder on your desktop and a tag on a photo.
Precisely. Ranganathan’s five laws of library science are still taught today. His work laid the conceptual groundwork for what we now call faceted search on e-commerce sites. When you go to buy a pair of shoes and you filter by size, color, brand, and price, you are using Ranganathan’s faceted taxonomy. You are not looking through one box, you are looking at the intersection of multiple attributes.
I want to dig into that transition from the physical to the digital. When we moved from categorizing birds and plants to categorizing bits and bytes, what changed in the philosophy of organization? Because it feels like the digital world should have solved all these problems, but in some ways, it has made them more complex.
The digital shift changed the "cost" of categorization. In a library, adding a new category meant moving physical shelves. In a database, it is just a new line of code. This led to the rise of the relational database model in the nineteen seventies, pioneered by Edgar F. Codd at IBM. He realized that data should be stored in tables that relate to one another through keys. This is the foundation of SQL, or Structured Query Language.
Daniel mentioned SQL specifically. When we talk about designing a data schema, we are talking about creating a very formal, very rigid taxonomy before any data even enters the system. You have to decide what the tables are, what the columns are, and how they relate. It feels like we went back to the rigidity of Linnaeus in some ways.
In a way, yes. SQL requires "schema on write," meaning you have to know the structure before you save the data. This is great for integrity. If you are a bank, you want a very rigid taxonomy for your transactions. You want to ensure that a "withdrawal" cannot be confused with a "deposit." You use things like the Third Normal Form to eliminate redundancy. It is a beautiful, mathematical way of organizing the world. But it struggles with "unstructured data," like a long email or a video file.
And that is where Content Management Systems, or CMS, come in, right? Most people interact with taxonomies through things like WordPress or Shopify.
Exactly. WordPress, which powers a huge chunk of the internet, has a very specific taxonomy built-in. You have "Categories," which are hierarchical, and "Tags," which are flat. It is a hybrid system. But as Daniel pointed out, we are seeing a shift toward "headless" CMS platforms like Contentful or Strapi. In a traditional CMS, the taxonomy is tied to how the page looks. In a headless system, the taxonomy is pure data. You define "Content Types." You might say, "I want a content type called 'Podcast Episode' and it must have a title, an MP3 link, a transcript, and a list of guests."
It is like building a custom skeleton for your information. But I see a problem here. The more flexible you make the system, the harder it is to maintain consistency across a large organization. If I call a guest a "speaker" and you call them an "interviewee," the system starts to break down.
That is the eternal struggle between "controlled vocabularies" and "folksonomies." A controlled vocabulary is a pre-defined list of terms. It is top-down. It ensures precision. A folksonomy, a term coined by Thomas Vander Wal in two thousand and four, is user-generated tagging. Think of hashtags on social media. It is bottom-up. It is great for discovery and seeing how people actually talk, but it is terrible for data integrity. If you search for "cinema" but I tagged my video as "movies," you might never find it.
It feels like we are constantly oscillating between these two poles. We want the freedom of tags, but we need the order of categories. Daniel also mentioned something called the Topic Universe Graph Node. That sounds like we are moving away from tables and toward something more organic.
We are. We are moving into the era of Graph Databases, like Neo4j. In a traditional SQL database, relationships are often an afterthought, something you join together when you need an answer. In a graph database, the relationship is a first-class citizen. You have "nodes," which are the things, and "edges," which are the connections. This is how Google’s Knowledge Graph works. When you search for an actor, Google doesn't just show you a list of movies, it shows you their spouse, their awards, and their birth date. It understands the web of relationships.
It feels like we are trying to mimic the way the human brain actually works. We do not store memories in a spreadsheet. We store them through associations. One smell reminds you of a childhood summer, which reminds you of a specific person, which reminds you of a song. It is all interconnected.
That is the goal of the Semantic Web, an idea championed by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. He envisioned a web where machines could understand the meaning of data, not just display it. We use things like RDF, the Resource Description Framework, to create "triples." A triple is a simple statement: Subject, Predicate, Object. For example, "Corn" "is a host of" "My Weird Prompts." If you have enough of these triples, the machine can start to make its own inferences. It can "reason" about the data.
But here is the scary part, Herman. As we move into February of twenty-six, we are seeing AI take over a lot of this work. We have Large Language Models that can read a million documents and "understand" them without a human ever defining a category. Do we even need taxonomists anymore?
We need them more than ever, but their role is changing. We are moving from "manual tagging" to "ontology engineering." An AI can group things, but it doesn't always know why it is grouping them. It might find a correlation between two things that is totally irrelevant or even harmful. We are also seeing the rise of "Vector Databases" like Pinecone or Milvus. These are fascinating. Instead of putting things in boxes, they turn every piece of information into a long string of numbers called a vector.
Wait, how does a number represent a category?
Think of it as a coordinate in a multi-dimensional space. If you have a thousand-dimensional space, "dog" and "puppy" will have coordinates that are very close to each other. "Dog" and "toaster" will be very far apart. When you ask an AI a question, it doesn't look for a keyword, it looks for the "nearest neighbor" in that mathematical space. This is called semantic search. It is incredibly powerful, but it is also a "black box." We cannot easily see why the AI thinks two things are related.
That brings up the issue of bias that Daniel mentioned. When you create a taxonomy, you are making a value judgment. You are saying these categories matter and these others do not. If an AI is creating its own taxonomy based on historical data, it is going to bake in all the prejudices of the past.
Absolutely. There is a landmark book by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star called "Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences." They argue that classifications are part of the "built information environment." They are often invisible, but they have massive power. Think about medical taxonomies. For decades, many diseases were categorized based on how they appeared in men. Women’s symptoms were often dismissed or categorized as "atypical" because they did not fit the established taxonomy. That is a life-or-death consequence of information architecture.
Or even something like "ethnicity" categories on a census. Those boxes change every ten years because our social understanding of identity changes. But the data we collected fifty years ago is stuck in the old boxes. It makes longitudinal study really difficult.
It is the "legacy data" problem. Once you commit to a taxonomy, you are often stuck with it for a long time. This is why Daniel’s interest in Content Management Systems is so relevant. If you build a rigid system today, you are handicapping your future self. Modern information architects are moving toward "composable" systems. They want to be able to swap out parts of the taxonomy as the world changes.
So, how should the average person approach this? Most of us are just drowning in files, emails, and photos. We try to use folders, but then we forget which folder we put things in. We try to use search, but we cannot remember the keywords. Is there a better way to be our own information architects?
I think the biggest takeaway from the history of taxonomy is to move away from the "one thing, one place" mentality. Stop trying to find the "perfect" folder. Instead, focus on metadata. If you are saving a document, don't just name it "Invoice." Name it "twenty twenty-six zero two twenty-four Invoice Acme Corp Marketing." You are essentially creating a flat taxonomy that is highly searchable.
It is like what we talked about in episode seven hundred and twelve regarding the "Second Brain" concept. It is about building a system that evolves with you. Use tags for "states" of a project, like "to-do" or "archived," and use categories for "broad domains," like "work" or "personal." But don't get too hung up on the perfect structure. The best taxonomy is the one you actually use.
And remember that your taxonomy is a living thing. In the world of software development, we talk about "refactoring" code. You should "refactor" your information architecture every few months. If you find yourself always looking for things in a certain way, change your system to match your behavior. Don't try to force your behavior to match a rigid system you created three years ago.
I love that idea of a living taxonomy. It makes me think about the work Daniel is doing with the Topic Universe Graph. He is trying to map the relationships between ideas in a way that allows for new connections to emerge. It is not just about storing information, it is about generating new insights.
That is the ultimate goal of taxonomy. It is not just a filing cabinet, it is a lens. When you organize information correctly, you start to see patterns you never noticed before. You see how a concept in biology relates to a concept in economics. You see how a historical event in the seventeen hundreds is influencing a technological trend in twenty-six. Taxonomy is the architecture of discovery.
It is the difference between a pile of bricks and a cathedral, as you said earlier. Both are made of the same material, but one has a structure that allows it to reach for the sky. I think about this in the context of our own show. We have over eight hundred episodes now. If someone wants to find every time we have talked about "the future of work," they are relying on our internal taxonomy. We are the architects of this weird little universe.
And it is a responsibility we take seriously. We want people to be able to navigate this tapestry of ideas. That is why we are always looking at how we can improve the way we organize our own data. We are currently looking into implementing a vector-based search for our archives, so you can search for "concepts" rather than just "keywords."
That would be incredible. Imagine being able to ask, "What have Corn and Herman said about the emotional impact of technology?" and getting a curated list of segments from across five years of shows. That is the power of modern information architecture.
It really is. And it brings us back to the human element. No matter how advanced the AI gets, we still need humans to decide what is "meaningful." An AI can find a thousand connections, but a human has to decide which ones are worth exploring. Taxonomy is an act of curation. It is an act of saying, "This matters."
I think that is a perfect place to wrap up. Taxonomy is not just a technical field, it is a deeply human one. It is how we make sense of our lives and our history. It is how we build the cathedrals of knowledge that future generations will walk through.
Well said, Corn. And thank you to Daniel for such a rich prompt. It is easy to take the "boxes" in our lives for granted, but when you look closely, you realize they are some of the most important things we have ever built.
If you have been enjoying these deep dives into the weird and wonderful prompts Daniel sends us, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Whether it is Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, those ratings and reviews really help other curious minds find the show. It is how we grow our own little community of information seekers.
They really do. And if you have a prompt of your own, something that makes you look at the world a little differently, send it our way. We love exploring these hidden architectures of reality.
You can find us at myweirdprompts.com, where we have the full archive and a contact form if you want to get in touch. You can also reach us at show at myweirdprompts.com. We love hearing from you, whether you are a professional taxonomist or just someone trying to organize their phone apps.
Thanks for joining us for another exploration. This has been My Weird Prompts.
We will see you next time. Goodbye!
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