Blog #7

"Organizing Information" organization structures:

Exact Organization schemes: "known-item" searching requires user to know what they're searching for. Requires little to no thought in order to create the system.

• Alphabetical: phone book
• Chronological: newspaper archive
• Geographical: interactive map

Ambiguous Organization schemes: made ambiguous by language, relying on a hierarchy of information. Difficult to design, maintain and sometimes to use.

• Topical: organized by subject or topic, ie yellow pages
  
• Task-oriented: organized into a collection of processes, functions or tasks. ie Word menus (edit, insert, format)
• Audience-specific: used when there are multiple audiences for one website. ie wsu.edu (future students, current students, parents, alumni)
• Metaphor-driven: creating an online space that mimics the real world. ie online library with librarian

Organization Structures:

1. Hierarchy: Top-down approach--mutually exclusive branching tree. Consider breadth (number of options per tab) and depth (how many clicks to get to the right page)
2. Hypertext: non-linear structure is flexible but can be confusing to users. Creative and useful relations between information
   
3. Relational database model: Bottom-up approach--a collection of records that lends itself to being customized through searches. This is good for audience-specific information, information is not mutually exclusive and can be miscellaneously reorganized in any number of ways. Creates greater efficiency and accuracy.
   

"Information Architecture" organization structures:

Themes to organize information:

• Category: related items
  
• Time: sequential order
  
• Location: orientation/direction
  
• Alphabetic:
  
• Continuum: quantity over a given range

1. Sequences: chronological, topics progressing from general to specific, alphabetical (index)

• Straight linear sequence - no choices, similar to a book.
• linear sequences with supporting digressions- option to view tangential information

2. Hierarchy: best for organizing complex information. Single or multi-tier hierarchies

• Simple hub-and-spoke structure - one central page with one subpage on each spoke
• Complex hierarchy - multiple subpages with subpages of their own

3. Webs: presents information through the free flow of ideas. Can be unpredictable and hard to navigate.

Blog #6

Summarizing & Key Terms

Summarizing Weinberger: Weinberger's book was all about the organization of information into the three orders of order. The first order involves physical objects, the second order involves short descriptions of those objects, and the third is dependent on the user to define how the object is categorized.
We learned that everything is miscellaneous, and everyone searches for information differently because they need it for different reasons. This is why using metadata as tags is important to finding the information you seek. Thus, Weinberger encourages us to participate in Web 2.0 by tagging sites and information. With enough participation, we can truly make the entire internet into miscellaneously ordered information, customized for everyone's needs.

Weinberger's other key terms include:

• top-down & bottom-up content which refer to who is categorizing the information (corporations/government or the people)
• metadata are the descriptive tags we give to information to better organize it
• miscellaneous is the state in which everything starts and to which it will return through categorizations

Summarizing Jenkins: Jenkins is big into the idea of participatory culture. He believes that to be media literate, we must not only "read" or view the media currently available, but we must become part of it to make media a "read/write" process. Jenkins uses convergence to describe the method through which how we interact with media is evolving. He makes references to pop culture and the niches of extremists who are creating affinity spaces for exchanging information and ideas based on media programming.

Jenkins' other key terms include:

• collaborative authorship which deals with fans and the author working together to create new ideas for the media
• user-generated content is something that is created by a fan of the media, like fan fiction, and rights are given to the company who created the original on which the new content was based
• collective knowledge is in a sense the wisdom of the crowd, combining everything a certain group of people know on a subject to create a greater whole
• world-making is the process in which a fictional world with its own rules is created with enough depth that it can be the basis for expanding story lines

Summarizing Lessig: Lessig tackles the idea of copyright, how it is currently being implemented, and recommendations on how it could be changed. He says that copyright laws are outdated for our digital era and need to be reworked in order to ensure creativity. Currently, the laws are set to protect the author of media, but end up benefiting the companies who own them instead. By incriminating people for downloading and remixing media, we are fueling the corporations which bind our hands and creative rights.
In addition to file-sharing and remixes, Lessig spends a fair amount of time talking about sharing, hybrid and commercial economies. When it comes down to it, it's all about the money. Sharing economies and commercial economies both benefit financially from working together.

Lessig's other key terms:

• amateur creativity produces a true "read/write" culture
• fair use is the portion of media you can use without copyright infringement
• creative commons is home to the "copyleft" doctrine and share and share alike way of copyright thinking

Connecting Weinberger, Jenkins & Lessig

All three of these books come back to the same fundamental point: Collaboration and online spaces is the way of the future. There are so many ways in which our current media enables users to contribute. Participatory culture and true media literacy with everyone using the idea of "read/write" media will produce new ideas, more access to information, and, with any luck, reformed copyright laws so that amateur creativity can blossom.
Weinberger wants to change how information is not only organized but thought about and accessed. Jenkins wants to change the way we interact with media, so that it becomes more engaging and customized to us. Lessig wants to change how copyright is regulated to legalize creativity.
All three of these books have some call to action, a message that is screaming to be heard. It's up to those of us who've heard the message to spread the word.


Application to the Final Project

The Community Action Center has another message, but it also requires participation and collaboration to be successful. The information on their site needs to be reorganized to make it more accessible and understandable. Perhaps a search box where users could input metadata would be a useful addition to the homepage. Of course, the CAC is trying to inspire participation, but not just in its online space, but in our community. By creating an exciting and useful site, we will be encouraging others to collaborate and make Pullman a better place for all. Making a site that stimulates creativity will help the community in new and exciting ways. When creative projects have been completed, they will promote more positive action within our community.

Blog #5

Intro: “Worship at the Altar of Convergence”

Overview: Our society, both analog and digital, corporate and grassroots, is coming together on an unavoidable collision course. It has the potential to deeply enrich our lives, as well as consume them. Overall, Jenkins talks about exploring participation in new media as well as access to this media, which he calls the “Black Box”: a single device for all things media.


Quotes:

“None of us can know everything; each of us knows something; and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills. Collective intelligence can be seen as an alternative source of media power. We are learning how to use that power through our day-to-day interactions with convergence culture.” (Jenkins 4)

“Convergence, as we can see, is both a top-down corporate driven process and a bottom-up consumer-driven process. Corporate convergence coexists with grassroots convergence… The promise of this new media environment raise expectations of a freer flow of ideas and content. Inspired by those ideals, consumers are fighting for the right to participate more fully in their culture.” (Jenkins 18)

Real World: Personally, I am like Jenkins in that I only use my cell phone for talking. So when I was home for Christmas and my sister (28) was glued to her iPhone watching YouTube videos, looking at pictures on Facebook, and texting for hours on end, naturally I was curious. Why is having all this in your pocket better than having it accessible from a computer? Both are already similar to the Black Box Jenkins mentions.

Weinberger Connections: Weinberger talked a lot about participation in the third order of order, but the internet was his main concern. Jenkins takes the idea of participation beyond internet interactions, and focuses more on people interacting with media through a variety of technology. Weinberger also focused on the bottom-up organization, whereas Jenkins views the bottom-up and the top-down as merging together to form the new media—giving people what they want.

Blog #4

Chapter 10: The Work of Knowledge
CODA: Misc.
& wrapping up

The universe is complex, yet everyone tries to simplify it, bending the interpretation to their needs. We can disagree with someone’s biases or opinions, but not with the facts themselves. These facts are the common ground needed to understand one another, so we can have an engaging conversation about the ideas related to the facts. In the third order of order, all of these ideas and facts are not ordered in a neat little tree, they are so interconnected that they form a cloud of collective knowledge, and require global input. This input makes the collective knowledge evolve until it reaches a stable consensus.

The world is miscellaneous in a different way than the third order is miscellaneous. We make choices about what we include in our miscellaneous knowledge tree- we can choose to disregard some of the leaves of the tree if that’s how we choose to organize our knowledge, and thus our understanding of the world. We can’t understand what we don’t know. And we are learning what we know in new ways within the digital disorder: we are learning more about how the world is connected, rather than how we’ve chosen to categorize it. It’s only through this way of lumping information that we’ve realized everyone has different needs when they’re on the hunt for knowledge. Because of these differences, miscellaneous organization using metadata (and now metaknowledge) is becoming our new tree of knowledge, one that uses Web 2.0 to connect people and ideas like never before.

In conclusion: The third order of order can be so miscellaneous that every person with every need imaginable can find the exact information they are looking for by using metadata in a search engine.

Blog #3

Chapter 8: What Nothing Says

Main Point: Explicit information, such as metadata, barely begins to scratch the surface of what implicit information really exists related to a particular object. Much of the meaning of implicit data is based on personal connections, perhaps obscure, and the context of information, so explicit information out of context has little or no value to the user. As computers collect explicit information and cross-reference it with more metadata tags, implicit meanings will become clearer to everyone, not only those who created a tag.

“So What?”: I like to think of the digital order of tree of knowledge more as an infinite string of twine. Everything is connected through something else, by a certain degree of separation. When that piece of twine is all balled up, information that didn’t seem to correlate is suddenly directly connected.
Not everyone carries the same implicit knowledge about a subject, but though as information is continually tagged, and computers make inferences and digitally connect concepts, places, ideas, and people, we will have the ability to access, reference and share implicit knowledge based on an explicit system of tags. Maybe one day we will be able to instantly access and share any information, definition, memory or incite we have with anyone in the world. I can’t help but think of the Borg.

Chapter 9: Messiness is a Virtue

Summary: Simplicity often helps people understand the truth of a situation, but if it’s too explicit, they will still not understand why it is the truth. The whole world cannot be divided up into cut-and-dry Aristotelian categories, rather categories are built around “good” examples of a concept, and the sort-of and kind-of good examples are clustered around them, but often can be placed in multiple categories. This messy, miscellaneous way of organizing information is more natural than the Aristotelian way, because it reflects how humans think.

“So What?”: Using a system of organization that is inherent to the way the brain works allows better access and interconnectivity between people. The “messiness” of digital order makes everything more useful. This goes back to Britannica categorizing topics with similar or relevant information. This kind of organization allows us to acquire knowledge about different subjects that may interest us based on how others have carved their path.
Mapping knowledge in this way makes it easier to find what we are looking for, and will help fully connect us as a global community.

Blog #2

Chapter 5: The Laws of the Jungle

Overview: Often times a miscellaneous category can be farther broken down into more specific categories, instead of lumping everything together, it is better to split it apart to find it in the future based on who is using the information. Organizational trees reduce what they are classifying down to how they relate to other branches of the tree. Tagging items is a newer way to cross-list things that belong to multiple categories that rely heavily on the user to create as many of their own terms to correctly define the object, but can introduce a form of ambiguity.

Quotes:

“We might say that the miscellaneous category should make us wary because it hides information waiting for a Lamarck to come along and split the lump in useful ways. Or we might say that Linnaeus was not miscellaneous enough… But every time you organize matters in one way, you are disordering them in others.” (Weinberger 88)

“But in the third order, the messiness of miscellaneous information doesn’t reduce its utility.” (Weinberger 94)

“In the miscellaneous order, the only distinction between metadata and data is that metadata is what you already know and data is what you’re trying to find out.” (Weinberger 104)

Relate it: This chapter dealt a lot with tags and metadata, and mentioned Flickr. In the past I have tried to find photos on the creative commons section of Flickr, but found that I was being too specific in my tags. I had to think more miscellaneously in order to find pictures that would work for my project. It wasn’t that there wasn’t a photo of a woman turned away from the camera on a dock, it was that there were not enough tags to clearly define the photo.

Chapter 6: Smart Leaves

Overview: From UPCs to RFIDs, metadata is standardizing the way the information is exchanged and tracked. Physical things, such as a species of fish or bird, can be classified either miscellaneously, taking all names of the species into consideration and lumping them together, or by being very meticulous in determining what qualifies as a different species. Smart leaves use any information as metadata, that when cross-referenced with the web gives the user all the related information they could ever want about their search query, all based on tags and links.

Quotes:

“Having lost essentialism, we don’t have a replacement that does as good a job at divvying up the things of the world. We don’t even have confidence that there is an inarguable way to divide the world into types of things. And that’s a problem, because as the world becomes more miscellaneous, if we can’t pin something down, we can’t coalesce information around it.” (Weinberger 117)

“As we mix computers and human intelligence to rake together all sorts of leaves about books and their relationships, those leaves will be associated in more and more ways, perpetually building our miscellaneous pile of leaves in fits and starts. It will be imperfect because there is no one ideal Hamlet we can blister-pack and bar-code once and for all, but that imperfection is also a source of richness.” (Weinberger 124)

“‘People keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable, and sequential when they can’t. Everything is deeply intertwingled.’” (Ted Nelson on Weinberger 125)

Relate It: This chapter talks a lot about Hamlet and its many versions, and how each is labeled with a separate identifier. This made me think of searching on Amazon for textbooks before the Bookie so graciously added the ISBNs to their website. It is a nightmare trying to find a certain edition of a book, especially when the title is something general like “Art History.” Even though ISBNs are an imperfect system, they are significantly more reliable than a search based on keywords, even in the third order.

Blog #1

Prologue: Information in Space

Overview: A store is really nothing more than information. The Staples Company has chosen to create a prototype lab to design the organization of this information based on physical distance and relationships between products as well as the consumer’s perspective. The organization they use is based on the average customer’s ability to find everything they need quickly; taking human physiology and thought proves into account. This carefully designed organization based on physical orientation and space is unnecessary in a digital setting where a keyword search customizes the organization of information to the user’s specific needs.

Quotes:

“Information is easy. Space, time and atoms are hard.” (Weinberger 5)

“We have organized our ideas with principles designed for use in the world limited by laws of physics.” (Weinberger 6-7)

“Information doesn’t just want to be free. It wants to be miscellaneous.” (Weinberger 7)

Relate it: This chapter talked about how grocery stores always organize milk against the back wall of the store. I had never thought about this being a way to make customers purchase other items. This kind of tactic was used at the RadioShack I used to work at. We had the pricey name brand cables display toward the front of the store, and the store brand cables at half the price in a back corner, hoping people would be distracted by the flashy display and not get the lower priced cables.

Chapter 1: The New Order of Order

Overview: This chapter defines the three orders of organizing information. In the first order, we physically group similar items into categories, in the second order, we use a physical catalog to describe items we will search by using key terms, the third order is the digital organization of information into multiple categories that is not possible using a physical catalog based on the ability and amount of data that must be stored. The new digital age of information organization does not rely on professional catalogers, as does the second order. The digital order organizes information in a way that makes it more miscellaneous and thus more usable to the general public.

Quotes:

“The solution to the overabundance of information is more information.” (Weinberger 13)

“The digital world thereby allows us to transcend the most fundamental rule of ordering the real world: instead of everything having its place, its better if things can get assigned to multiple places simultaneously.” (Weinberger 14)

“Third order practices undermine some of our most deeply ingrained ways of thinking about the world and our knowledge of it.” (Weinberger 22)

Relate it: This has happened to me several times: I go to a store hoping to find a particular item, but go home empty handed. I search on that store’s website for the item that I was physically looking for in the store, and find it instantly. Sometimes it is an item that wasn’t available in the store because of lack of physical space to store the item on a shelf, other times it is because the item I was looking for was categorized under something other than what I was looking for, proving that the digital order is more efficient for multiple users.

Chapter 2: Alphabetization and its Discontents

Overview: Alphabetical organization is arbitrary and lends no additional information about the item being classified. Defining objects into categories only serves to say that that object fits that definition, just as drawing such defining lines delineates power and privilege, and the control of categorizations. Instead of grouping items arbitrarily, or by useless categories, we need an organization created specifically for our “permanent tastes and momentary situation,” something that only miscellaneous digital organization can offer.

Quotes:

“Beyond alphabetical order is the purely miscellaneous: Every idea is browsable and ideas are instantly assembled into Propaedias and Syntopicons relevant to each person’s particular needs and way of thinking. This is the world digital order is creating.” (Weinberger 32)

“The physical world isn’t arranged arbitrarily, like the letters of the alphabet, nor is it based upon the whimsy of any single scholar. Science is all about finding the joins of nature. For example, no one disputes the order of the planets.” (Weinberger 35)

“Our insistence on maintaining the category even though there is no compelling scientific reason to do so exposes a deeper meaning that is becoming more important as more realms break free of their categorical tethers and join the swirl of the miscellaneous: How we organize our world reflects not only the world but also our interests, our passions, our needs, our dreams.” (Weinberger 39-40)

Relate it: Mortimer Adler was anti-alphabetization, pro-topical organization for encyclopedias. I remember doing research in my high school library about Shakespeare and having to look in several different volumes for different things, and how difficult a time I had trying to find listings because they were listed by topic. I was used to finding things using alphabetic organization, so any change from what I was used to was frustrating. I think this is part of human nature. However, people who prefer to search topically and those who prefer to search alphabetically can both benefit from digital organization.