August 30, 2004

Ethnoclassification and vernacular vocabularies

The latest meme to catch fire in the IA community deals with the folk classification tools found on systems like del.icio.us and Flickr. Users are able to freely tag content with whatever metadata comes to mind.

Headshift provides a good overview of the issues at hand, and Alex does his thing when making sure we appreciate the good and the bad of such approaches.

I just IMed with Victor about this for a while, and thought I'd chime in with my perspective.

I touched on this topic almost three years ago in a post titled "Vernacular Thesauri," based on a talk I saw at the 2001 ASIS Annual. Go read it. It's about porn.

Okay, you back?

First off, I think we should drop the term "folksonomy." No offense to Thomas -- it's a catchy term, which, I guess, is why it has caught on. It's also inaccurate. What bugs me most is the use of the word "taxonomy." Taxonomies tend toward hierarchy, and they tend to be imposed. Tagging does not a taxonomy make.

What we're talking about here is "classification." In rooting around, trying to find some prior research on this topic, I plugged "folk classification" into Google, it turns out that anthropologists have done some thinking around this, particularly with respect to ethnobiology, or how the folk approach biology, and ethnoscience.

This lead me to think that the appropriate term would be "ethnoclassification", and when I plugged that into Google, I found "Slouching Toward Infrastructure", a page for a 1996 Digital Libraries Workshop lead by Susan Leigh Star.

The practice of tagging on del.icio.us works because, at its heart, it's meant for the use of the individual doing the tagging. The fact that it contributes to the group is a happy by-product... But as a tool for group tagging, it's woefully insufficient. Del.icio.us has a very low findability quotient. It's great for serendipity and browsing, and an utter disaster for anything targeted.

This is where Alex's quest for a middle ground resonates with me. Being as wedded to the practical as I am, I wonder how we could put such ethnoclassifications to work in useful contexts. I'm thinking maybe an intranet, where people are free to tag documents as they see fit, but there is some librarian/IA role that attempts to provide some degree of robustness to such a scattered classification. If nothing else, this approach would be a boon to developing thesauri, particularly variant terms.

Posted by peterme at 10:55 PM | Comments (26)

Organizational Lessons from Burning Man - Spreading Memes

Chatting with some friends who have been going to Burning Man for years, we marveled at how, even with it's astonishing growth, the event has been able to retain it's essence year after year. It's remarkable that, while the experience necessarily changed (25,000 people is just too different from 250), the spirit, and what draws people to it, has stuck around. Yes a few jaded folks dismiss the more recent instantiations, but that's little more than old-timers pining for long-lost glory days.

Anyway, in our discussions, it became clear that, among the things it has done very right, Burning Man has a small set of core principles that are easy to communicate:

- No spectators
- No commerce
- Leave no trace
(there are probably others, these are what sprung to mind).

Such simple and clear memes are easy to spread, and won't mutate. Additionally, they're pithy, unambiguous, and directive. They thus support dissemination to a wide audience, and can effectively prepare first-timers for what is expected of them. Any growing organization can learn from this example.


Posted by peterme at 09:15 PM | Comments (4)

August 29, 2004

People Are The Same The World Over

I've just completed the first section of Lawrence Weschler's delightful collection of essays, Vermeer in Bosnia. One essay, "Aristotle in Belgrade", follows protests in the face of rigged elections. He describes the Serbian political mindset as being able to support seeming opposites -- "they could simultaneously feel that their neighbors were affording them no threat and exult at a visiting demagogue's promise that he wasn't going to let those neighbors 'beat you anymore,'"" -- and of not being cognizant of consequences -- "They saw no problem in roundly despising a leader and simultaneously planning to vote for him."

Weschler explains the origin of such puzzling thought as "state propoganda, [which] had blithely spewed forth all manner of contradictory positions simultaneously." His tone, however, is a bit condescending -- as if it's a Serbian problem that he just cannot understand.

I read that passage the day I read Louis Menand's piece in the latest New Yorker, "The Unpolitical Animal." It's a roundly depressing piece, filled with evidence that people make political decisions without the slightest concern for ideology, issues, and consequence. I'll quote the passage that connected me to Weschler's work:

Repeal [of the estate tax, which effects the wealthiest two percent of the populations] is supported by sixty-six per cent of people who believe that the income gap between the richest and the poorest Americans has increased in recent decades, and that this is a bad thing. And it’s supported by sixty-eight per cent of people who say that the rich pay too little in taxes. Most Americans simply do not make a connection between tax policy and the over-all economic condition of the country.

Americans are, clearly, just as contradictory as Weschler's Serbs. I suspect Weschler's condescension toward the Serbian mindset has likely lifted, given an editorial he penned for the LA Times, "He's The Picture of Racial Compassion," about how President Bush employs photos of himself with black people in an attempt to demonstrate his "compassion" toward them, though his policies have only served to hurt them.

Weschler is the head of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, though it's not clear that the institute actually does anything.

He's also trying to get a magazine titled Omnivore off the ground.

And the Globe and Mail has a decent interview with Weschler.

Posted by peterme at 10:26 PM | Comments (2)

Jumping through hoops

A while back I posted about how product designs are getting too difficult, and how the greater the number of steps it takes for someone to set up a product, or to use a service, the less successful they will be. In it, I mentioned the Six Sigma concept of Rolled Throughput Yield: "the probability of being able to pass a unit of product or service through the entire process defect-free."

Let's say you have a website, and a registration process that takes four steps. Each step is pretty well-designed-- 90% of users are able to complete each step. However, only 65% of people will actually make it through, because you're losing people every step of the way (.9 x 4 = .65). The shows that often the best way to address the problem is not to improve the individual elements, but to remove elements altogether.

More recently, I wrote about how hard it is for organizations to produce well-designed products, because in order for a good design get out in the world, it has to run jump through a set of departmental hoops -- be approved by the business owners, marketers, designers, engineers, manufacturers, etc. etc. At each step, the project can be stalled. Or so many people have to be pleased, products are "designed by committee" - not a recipe for innovation.

This struck me as a kind of organizational variant to Rolled Throughput Yield. Particularly because we've seen that the organizations that do support innovative design have smaller, multi-disciplinary teams, not departmental stovepipes. It also struck me that these are two sides of the same coin. The complexity of product from the first example is often a result of the complexity of organizations in the second -- design by committee, or some form of serial design process, leads to products with too many discrete parts and interfaces, which are essentially invitations for something to go wrong.

Separately, on a bit of a Googlewander, I came across David Woods, who, among other things, has written about "human error."In reading some papers he wrote on the topic, I came across this diagram:
error
Taken from here (PDF), which is meant to be read in conjunction with this (PDF).

(I've been meaning to read more of David's stuff for a while. I think the study of "human error" can be an insightful perspective for user-centered design.)

The challenge, of course, seems to be to manage complexity. Complexity seems to be a given. Is it? Is increasing complexity inevitable? Occasionally products emerge that massively reduce complexity (at least, complexity of use), and are popular -- the original Palm (compared to earlier pen-based computing) and Google come to mind. Maybe the iPod (I don't know how it stacks up to other music players from a complexity standpoint).

Posted by peterme at 01:58 PM | Comments (27)
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