information architecture » Genius On Hold

A Citizen Curator

learning

Feb 132012

About three weeks ago, I started using Pinterest. I’d seen others using it, but hadn’t seen the appeal myself until I saw another writer using a section of theirs as a vision board. Realizing there have been many times when I’ve tried (and failed) to beat Springpad into vision boards, I decided to give Pinterest a chance.

If you haven’t seen Pinterest, it’s essentially a visual bookmarking site. You can pin an image (which automatically links to its source if it was taken from somewhere online, which is a nice feature) or you can like an image someone else has posted. When you pin an image, you have to pin it to one of your boards. Pinterest offers a number of “template” boards, with a theme and a summary, but you can ignore these and easily create your own boards. (To be honest, I think I made my own boards in stead of using one of theirs.)

The whole set-up seemed simple enough, right up until it was time to start selecting boards for my early pins. What did I really mean by “Fantastic Settings” and “Math Class” (which was removed in favor of better boards)? I kept finding myself with pins I had to like because they didn’t fit my board structure. Over the past couple of weeks, my boards have slowly evolved into the vision boards they are now, and I’m betting they will continue to evolve as I continue using the service. I’ll keep seeing different ways to group what I have into boards that are more useful to me at that moment.

Using Pinterest has made me rethink how I use Springpad. Springpad is a flexible, well-planned digital notebook. It, along with Evernote, taught me how to use tags and categories…to the point where I kept trying to impose category thinking on my project-based notetaking system. Working with Pinterest and their board system, and watching how my own sense of organization has changed in response to Pinterest’s structure has made me realize that my approach to Springpad would probably benefit from a more flexible mindset, too. Instead of categories that notes will fail to be useful in, I’ve taken the Notebook structure and made that serve as the “categories”, giving me projects or some sort of related theme to help me better interact with my notes.

There are lessons to be learned here. First, any tool that can help you organize your thoughts and see what you’re doing and where you’re going are worth exploring. Second, learning how to categorize is important because it allows us to make some sense out of the chaos. But we need to understand that there isn’t just one right way to classify things, nor does something always belong in a single grouping. In fact, there will be times when something will need to be momentarily re-classified to help us with our work. It’s an object, an artifact, and it’s modular. It can be what we need, just by rethinking its classification.

The Recovering Archivist

creativity

Feb 072012

Tagging and I have a tumultuous relationship. You wouldn’t know it to look at my various web spaces now, but when tagging was first handed over to content creators and consumers I wrestled with it. Actually, that’s giving me too much credit. I fought it tooth and claw. I couldn’t see how tags were better than the categories blogging platforms already provided us. (I actually have been around long enough that I remember not having categories…) I couldn’t see the point to tags, but nearly every social media space was expecting me to figure it out and use it.

Unfortunately, the little voice in my head (who delights in getting me in trouble) reminded me that I spent a year or so organizing the physical card catalog in my high school’s library and that I am trained in collections management, and that I did actually understand metadata in terms of classifying and cross-referencing. It made convincing arguments for how faceted tagging can make navigating websites easier on the user. Please believe me when I say it’s hard to fight against the little voice in your head when it’s suffering from a bout of rational thinking, so I started playing with tagging.

At first, it was very slow. I’d debate for nearly an hour (not kidding) over the exactly perfect tag (because my brain didn’t want to accept that something could have more than one category and tag) for a blog post. I’d give up all together and just start tagging willy-nilly or I’d just stop tagging for a couple of months. Then, I’d need to find something, and I was on LiveJournal where there was no native search function, and I’d have to try to remember when I thought I wrote the post and slog through tens of posts trying to find what I wanted.

Finally, my brain exploded. I was spread across half a dozen social media sites, unable to find anything, and that oh-so-helpful voice in my head was frequently reminding me that my collections management and database management professors would strangle me if they could see the mess I’d created. So I sat down and went through everything I had posted (roughly six years’ worth of artifacts) and carefully created a tag system…complete with synonyms and inconsistent applications of the same tag. It’s taken me a couple of years, but I’ve finally got my system down to a handful of categories and a group of tags that actually makes sense to me and that I can remember when I go to tag something new. I can even find things now…when I remember to tag them.

And then Twitter introduced hashtags…

Information Architecture as a Teaching Tool

teaching

Jan 312012

Classification is not on my list of transdisciplinary skills, and perhaps it should be. It’s a special way of establishing relationships or connections between different artifacts, be they physical objects or digital bits of data. And it’s purely contextual, which means you can take the artifacts that have been classified and recycle them into a new classification system to match a new context. It’s effectively the bedrock for rip-mix-burn. (Am I allowed to say that, or did I just date myself there?)

What we’re really doing when we classify a set of artifacts is establishing some sort of differentiating criteria. “This artifact is like this artifact because of this trait, but it’s different than this other artifact because the other artifact’s version of this trait is different.” That sounds complicated, but we do it automatically. We group by nature. Don’t believe me? When I was doing my teacher prep work, I was living with my cousin, who had a baby shortly after I moved in. I spent a lot of time playing with her son, watching what he was doing and how he was doing it. One day when he was about eighteen months old, I came in from class and my grandmother pointed out what he’d been up to that afternoon. He’d taken all of his red toys and placed them on his red chair. He had no idea why my grandmother was marveling. He had no idea why I was so excited. He just knew he’d put these like things together and made the grown-ups happy in the process.

The need to group by some differentiating trait is innate.

While this can be pursued to detrimental results, it can also be a good things. By learning how to look at how a group of artifacts relate to each other, we develop the ability to analyze and identify key traits of the artifacts. We learn to analyze for patterns in similarities and differences, which in turn gives us a sharper vocabulary to define what we are and are not looking for. We learn how to create metadata, which is becoming more and more necessary as we create and share more digital artifacts, effectively becoming citizen curators who need to connect with other citizen curators through that common metadata.

Whether working collaboratively to identify and tag key traits on artifacts or working on your own to create metadata for your own artifacts so that they’ll be findable by someone who doesn’t necessarily see the artifacts the way you do, having the ability to classify is an innate and increasingly necessary skill.