Order of Orders
This week’s readings were all about organizing and categorizing in both the physical world and the digital world.
For a little background, on page 17 of Everything is Miscellaneous, Weinberger introduces the idea of orders of order (and uses a group of photos called the Bettmann Archive as an example):
Along with this idea is a theme that shows up in both books “…in the physical world, two objects cannot occupy the same place at the same time� (Weinberger, 4), and “Physical objects can typically be in only one place at one time� (Information Architecture, Morville and Rosenfeld, 221). Because of this “brute fact,� the people who work with physical objects have to, first, use the first order of order to carefully decide how and where to put them, and then secondly, use the second order of order to figure out how to keep track of all of it.
How to do this organizing has apparently been a time-consuming, thought-provoking problem for a long time. In Information Architecture, all of chapter 9 is devoted to ways of organizing information using thesaurui, classifications, etc. in order to find other information. It touches on the old (Dewey Decimal System) to new (metadata tags and navigation).
But now, with so much information being put online, organizing is obviously very different. This leads Weinberger to suppose “…now, for the first time in history, we are able to arrange our concepts without the silent limitations of the physical� (Weinberger, 7). The physical objects aren’t really there—it’s just bits of information, which is where the third order of order takes over.
When the object is digital, a piece of data can show up in multiple spots and be found through multiple methods such as keywords, hierarchy, or even misspellings. Flickr or del.icio.us tags can lead the way, as can metadata, a thesaurus, a synonym ring, or one of the many other ways information is organized online.
Weinberger says, “As we invent new principles of organization that make sense in a world freed from physical constraints, information doesn’t just want to be free. It wants to be miscellaneous� (7). There doesn’t have to be a direct path to one location like there would be in finding photo in the Bettmann Archive (Weinberger, 17). The miscellaneous way is using one of the many ways to find a digital photo in the Corbis online catalog of images (Weinberger, 20).
Comments
Michelle, I'm so glad you wrote a post on orders. It definitely helped me understand the material better, and you explained it better than I could have explained it. I love the fact that everyone is helping others in class learn more (even if we may not know it). We're like giving each other educational food/fuel and that's great!
Posted by: Hoang-Uyen N. | April 12, 2008 9:34 PM