Sharp Blue: The art of shih

In David Zindell’s wonderful Neverness books, shih was

…the opposite of facts and raw information; shih was the elegance of knowledge, the insight and skill to organize knowledge into meaningful patterns. As an artist chooses colours or light to make her pictures, a master of shih chooses textures of knowledge - various ideas, myths, abstractions, and theories - to create a way of seeing the world. The aesthetics and beauty of knowledge - this was shih.

I have no idea what the etymon of the word “shih” might be, but it seems like an extraordinarily useful concept. I’d really like to become a master of shih, and it seems that the best way to do so is to read books on fields that are aspects of shih and to assimilate their lessons. The only problem is that I’m not sure which books are best. I’ve already read Edward Tufte’s books on the graphical presentation of information, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations, which seems like a fine start. On typographic design, I’ve read Robin Williams’ The Non-Designer’s Design Book. And that’s all.

I’d imagine that shih would encompass such fields as graphic design, writing style (both on a paragraph level and on the level of entire documents), hypertext design, web design, rhetoric, pedagogy and so on: anything that involves the structuring and presentation of information in the most elegant and lucid manner. So what else should I read?