Tag Archives: learning journal

Organising Information

Over the course of the semester I’ve examined ideas associated with information organisation and experience. Interestingly, it appears that for a field so concerned with the order and structure of information, it is surprisingly nebulous as a concept. Applying the principles and practices of organisation seems to be part art, part science, and a creative fusion of knowledge and intuition. Seeking to understand the notion of ‘what is’—and how to express it—is a profoundly philosophical question, and I feel that the activities across the semester have allowed me to consider some approaches to finding an answer.

In completing these activities—and the course as a whole—I’ve come to appreciate stepping outside my own experiences, and trying to intuit some understanding of the experiences others. Consistency, understanding, and comprehension are all part of a shared-experience of information that I have found is critical to addressing needs other than one’s own. I’m more than a little curious about finding new ways to organise and present information that is logical and meaningful to those seeking to use it, and in doing so, I feel that I have gained a deeper understanding of how to order and express my own thoughts.

If anything, the greatest hurdle to my engagement with this field is that it is simply too big to know. But, considering the depth and breadth of information practices through a practical, applied approach—and engaging in these reflective activities—has certainly helped me come to some sort of understanding.

I would not have expected an information technology course to be the catalyst that led me to consider fundamentally philosophical, ontological questions about the state of being, but I welcome that it has. I feel that participating in this unit has strengthened my burgeoning interest in how to understand the representation of information, and improved my clarity of expression in these concepts.

Organisation—it seems to me—is fundamentally both a form and function of information: It is only through the process of organising and presenting data that we ascribe meaning to it and allow it to evolve into something meaningful; something that resonates with others; something informative.

Tag, You’re It!

Participatory web technologies in libraries are empowering users to engage with each other socially through reviewing, tagging, and rating content to potentially expose it to thousands of people who might otherwise never have seen it. Arguably, this is a very good thing.

Users with specific domain knowledge can provide a more detailed, comprehensive description of a resource than a harried librarian may be able to. Devoting their time and expert knowledge to enrich a record adds immeasurable value to the system as a whole. Furthermore, emulating the robust recommender systems of web giants such as Amazon can be provide new, meaningful pathways to content discovery.

Third-party services such as LibraryThing and GoodReads already provide many of these functions, and are fast gaining a great deal of traction, making it possible for users to participate in  catalogues—but these services still require external layers of software to function.

The problem with embracing this unchecked enthusiasm for social data lies in placing increased responsibility on unaccountable amateurs. Freely chosen words lack the structure or consistency demanded by cataloguing, and social data has a tendency towards mislabeling important data and misrepresenting contentious issues. Adversarial tagging or deliberate vandalism pollutes records, and personal tagging with no thought towards the overall context dilutes the usefulness of the system.

Existing cataloguing practices are overseen by the skilled work of experts, whereas the unmoderated nature of current social indexing platforms is lawless by comparison. Successfully integrating these participatory elements must be done with the utmost care.

A Class of His Own

All the resources in the world are useless if they cannot be consistently located. Since consistency is so critical to arranging resources in a searchable fashion, incumbent standards such as Dewey (DDC) have managed to propagate and persist long past their relevance. As the information delivery profession has evolved over time, it has been necessary to bootstrap successive layers of functionality onto a system never designed for it.

Dewey’s classification schema is certainly a product of its time. The original schema has gradually slipped further and further behind modern thinking, and increasingly reflects a comparatively narrow view of the world. Numbering systems and branching trees fundamentally have an implied hierarchy, and  Melvil Dewey envisioned these hierarchies to reflect his own understanding of the world in 1876.

But, these simply ordered categories have very real ramifications today, and the organisational schema chosen by Dewey may cause unnecessary harm or distress to information seekers by the ways in which it privileges—or disparages—certain elements such as religion or gender. To make matters worse, nuances of information that Dewey could never have envisioned—such as the entire field of Computer Science—have been awkwardly shoehorned into existing systems, diminishing the simplicity and usefulness of the system by introducing increasingly arcane complexities.

Adhering to a system built on narrow-minded, provincial ideas, leaves many of today’s information authorities in a worryingly untenable position. The only real solution to rectifying these mistakes is the colossal undertaking of migrating to a different schema, and reorganising centuries of work.

Mr. Dewey certainly has a lot to answer for.

A Pattern Language

I cannot escape the idea that resource description is an exercise in abstraction: thinking about huge sums of information and knowledge in ways that can be summarised, organised, and represented.

As an exercise, it asks me to consider fundamentally philosophical, ontological questions about the state of being. In my mind, ontology refers to the old philosophical questions of ‘what kind of things exist’, whereas the librarian, programmer, or taxonomist grapples with the question of ‘what kind of things should we capture and represent?’.

Taking the philosophical argument one step further, it is worth considering the work of empirical philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein posed many questions about epistemology—the theory of how knowledge is acquired and represented—and argued that language permeates and defines reality. Words are tools, he argues, and instruments that provide the necessary, contextual clues to provide clarity to understanding. Wittgenstein posited that without agreed-upon ordinary language, understanding becomes frictionless ice that fails to describe or impart any knowledge.

Structured cataloging systems explicitly demand language be stripped down to its functional, tool-like purpose. Proper categorisation is the key to facing the exponential growth of texts and media, and consistent, structured metadata means we can find the most relevant documents in the least possible time.

Legacy systems for representing bibliographic information like ISBD are undeniably powerful, but were developed for a context that no longer exists. Bootstrapping successive iterations of new categories, descriptors, and data onto a system that was built in an era of card catalogs has lead to bloated, indecipherably specific codes that can only be parsed by machines and seasoned operators. The drive towards an inclusive, semantic approach to information systems has brought ordinary language to the fore of systems design, and the archaic codification of bibliographic records in ISBD is jarringly outdated.

The semantic approach to cataloging demands no less rigour in creating authoritative, consistent, and highly-descriptive records, but great strides are being made in the evolution of information standards such as RDA. RDA not only parses information in ordinary language, but adds relational layers of metadata that situate records in terms of context, not just content.

I’ll finish these musings with a quote from architect Christopher Alexander, who in discussing construction for his 1974 book Notes on the Synthesis of Form described language in a way that prophetically resonates with the future of semantic data we now face:

“We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed and a context which we cannot properly describe.”

(Alexander, 1974, p.26)

The Map Defines the Territory

Information architecture (IA) is a fascinating and compelling part of information organisation. Search is not a solved problem. Indeed, searchability and findability are among the most nagging problems facing information professionals. Findability—or lack thereof—is one of the defining elements of user experience. Unfortunately, it is also a source of endless frustration. It has the worst usability problem on the web. User needs and goals are obstructed by systemic failures in findability, and a website that is not easy to navigate is functionally useless.

My own experiences with technology have taught me that developers do not necessarily have the perspective to design usable systems. What they may think is an effective system is designed to only support an aspirational, best-case-scenario for navigation. What looks elegant from a coders perspective may not provide an optimal—or acceptable—experience.

Examining the council websites of the cities of Melbourne, Hobart, and Perth highlighted some of these elements. Melbourne and Hobart both demonstrated integrate, sensible designs that kept the same standard layout for the overall navigation of the website, and loaded pertinent content into a dynamically updated frame. Perth, however, insisted on having new subsets of menus and navigations for different sections, many of which had no visible ties to overall structure and obfuscated access to content. Intuitive architecture should provide universal navigation with no ‘orphaned’ avenues of browsing. Every page of the website should be able to function as a landing page with a completely accessible hierarchy of menus demonstrating where the user is, how they got there, and where they can go. As with physical architecture, information architecture relies on firm foundations to build anything stable. Logically relevant parent categories, proper meta-tagging, and a well-represented taxonomies form the bedrock on which any information-rich website should be built.

It is unforgivable for large entities such as a city council to build sloppy websites. All websites—especially those in the public sector—should be doing the right thing by default. Ease-of-use should be rigorously tested through prototyping and wire-framing, and consistency of style and standards should be paramount. Coders hate redundancy, but having logical replication of data facilitates how users really make use of websites—often in a meandering, scattershot approach.

The core thing I have taken away from information architecture is that it has to be—like a building—designed from the ground up. Every element must have a strong foundation of accessibility and functionality that relates to how people are actually using something, rather than designing with your own plan in mind then instructing people how to use it. IA relies wholly on taking an objective approach to design that Isn’t self interested. Developing good IA habits demands stepping outside your own perspective and engaging with that subjective, user experience of using a website.

Six Degrees of Web Navigation

The pseudo-game ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’ is born from the idea that any actor in a feature film can, in six-or-less ‘hops’ via other actors be connected back to the ubiquitous Kevin Bacon.

I like films. I like watching them, I like collecting film trivia, and I like talking about films. I am fairly indifferent to Kevin Bacon as an actor, but have become fairly adept at this game over time simply by force of circumstance and watching too many films.

For this week’s activity I invited a friend who is only passingly interested in film to use the Internet Movie Database (IMDB.com) to play this game against me. I asked that he navigate the connective web of actors orbiting Bacon while speaking to his decision making processes and the usability of IMDB as a tool for finding out what he needed to know. I chose to examine this scenario specifically as it gave my observed user a compelling motivation for performing complex searches (beating me at the game) and it offered a wide variety of approaches to navigating a resource (IMDB).

Through a combination of observation and direct, focussed question I arrived at some understanding of his needs when using the site. He was extremely helpful in keeping up a running commentary of his navigation through the site, and gave me a great set of talking points that resonated with what I had been reading about UX design. Many of his searches fell apart immediately with poor choices of searching methods, but the fact that almost any meaningful piece of data (names, dates, titles, genres etc.) had fully realised, relational links to every other piece of data made recovery a breeze. Rarely did the interface or tools of IMDB inhibit his progress, and he candidly offered that he liked how it ‘just worked’.

The first thing that struck me was how similar many of the concepts in good UX design were to those praised in good writing: Explicit is better than implicit, concise is better than verbose, constrained is better than unconstrained. At every step of this process, my observation was finding that IMDB had nailed the basics — search was simple, intuitive, and unobtrusive. The site had set out to do a specific thing and that focus on simplicity had allowed it to be great at something. Prompts were clear and consistent, default options were well-configured to reduce effort, and the various toggles and actions favoured punchy, active verb use such as ‘Remember my search’, and ‘Enable additional fields’ rather than less-friendly, subtractive alternatives.