Knowledge management
The practices and systems used to capture, organise, store, and retrieve information in ways that make it genuinely useful over time. In personal contexts this ranges from commonplace books and margin annotations to modern tools like Roam Research, Obsidian, and Zettelkasten systems. A recurring debate in the field concerns the structure of links between ideas: early hypertext pioneers like Ted Nelson envisioned bidirectional links and atomic, reusable units of knowledge long before the web was built, arguing that the internet as implemented falls short of what knowledge infrastructure could be. The question of how erudite thinkers managed before digital tools — and whether rote memorisation and slower information environments produced a different but comparably deep kind of knowledge — is an enduring one.