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We are back at vocabulary and sharing across discipline problems. Sounds familiar. Anyhow...

I attended the first Adaptive Path seminar at the Web 2001 Conference in September 2001. There I added a much better content inventory (CI) tool to my tool belt. One of the things I tied into the CI was a content object listing, which tied in to a document type matrix. I have been using the content object and document type matrix since 1998 or 1999 as a tool to help build templates for sites and later on to help build CMS. Knowing genre or the librarian's research would have greatly helped.

What are content objects? These are the granular components on a page: logo, bar chart, address, breadcrumb, contact info, paragraphs, ordered lists, data tables (simple, complex, hierarchal, etc.), related links, local navigation, global navigation, document navigation, etc. These are the objects that will need to be designed for consistance across a site. They also become entries in a cascading style sheet (CSS).

What is document type matrix? Similar to Peter's genre and along the lines of shape of information, I use the CI and then add a column to enter the type of document (trying to keep the types as contorlled as possible): memo, press release, scientific report, calendar, browsing page (an annotated link page), home page, etc. Once these have been entered into the CI matrix I collapse by document type to see trends.

At this point the content objects get tied to the document type. The permeations and consistancy begin to show through. This allows us to build templates for the document types or genre quite easily. When I was building (hand-rolling) CMS (up to late 2001) this was insanely helpful as it made building the components needed as easy as checklists.

Had I paid attention to what you, Peter, were doing or known what librarians were doing it would have helped. It still can as we move forward.

I have used this approach 20 to 30 times in the past four to seven years and have been refining it since. Everybody I work with has tweaked the process and the documents (done in Excel consistantly now). I suppose it is time to write it up and share as talking about it seems to get lost in the shuffle.

Ha! If they have known it for years, why the hell isn't anyone really leveraging it, and where is the good academic research telling us about what works and what doesn't.

I'm still not sure I see Genre as an advancement of our processes or solution set. To me, it would appear that the term Genre simply replaces Content Type as it's been used (I think fairly broadly) by IAs developing content inventories.

Admittedly, the shift is advantageous as it mitigates confusion that might've occurred because of Content Type's connotations. Thomas describes using "Document Types." I've been in situations where the client wanted to use "Object Types." I think neither term is particularly ideal... So, Genre probably does the best job of conveying intent.

Don't get me wrong.. I very much like the term Genre and I especially like the marriage of Genre with shape research - this could be extraordinarily useful when walking clients through the CI exercise. I'm still looking for the "new" thing though.

Genres are a form of classification and so strongly depend on context. You will also have exceptions, exceptions, exceptions. I do not doubt that genres can be used nor that they are very useful (!), but the deeper you look into details the more complicated it get's and you need a lot of rules and discipline.

Vanderwal mentions - what I consider - one of the most important aspects of handling content in digital form. The multidimensional matrix consisting of content objects (analysed to some level og granularity), the document types, the styling etc.
All of which for instance the e-learning world have been working on at least since 1998. I myself designed a production methodology as early as 1999 in Oracle Denmark - in the vain hope that the e-learning server application in development at Oracle at that time - would be ready on time.
The goal of my work was to develop at theory/practice to handle e-learning AND other communication tasks (Presentation, Marketing etc) - reusing the SAME content objects in a number of document types and serving different communication purposes.
I don't work on that anymore. It is not unproblematic. For instance there are a number of problems with consistency in linguistic form - rhetoric, and illustrations style. These are not plain to overcome.

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