today i cleaned the kitchen, started tidying the living room, bought some flowers for the table, and talked with my mom about my capstone.
i have had a few really good conversations this week about my ideas, but i’m still having a really hard time boiling them down to the key points when i sit down to write, and it’s frustrating. i start in on one thing and then it makes me think about seventy-five other things and i get all tangled up in myself and can’t figure out how to tie things together.
i told my mom this and she said i should just write a sentence or two for each of the key pieces and build from there, which is what everyone says (including me), but i have even been struggling with that because it’s hard for me to figure out where one idea ends and another begins, so what starts out as one sentence turns into a paragraph and a half and i eventually just throw my hands in the air and give up. i have been slowly making progress anyway by forcing myself to focus, but it still feels a lot like sludging through thick mud.
my mom said that i had done a good job of articulating the points while we were talking, and i said thanks, but the problem is that the talkie brain doesn’t always cooperate with the writey brain, so i was still worried about what would happen when i sat down before the page or screen. she offered to mirror what she heard back to me, which i thought was a great idea, but i had to go to the commencement dinner ceremony, and i was worried about running up my daytime minutes on my phone.
so i asked her if she would write the points up in an email and send them to me, and she said sure thing.
then when i got home from dinner, there was this wonderful summary of the conversation in my inbox, and suddenly the day feels really productive.
it’s not exActly right, but i have to do Something to earn my degree, right? ;)

it is really cool to have a mom who’s so willing to go the extra mile to help me figure out what i’m figuring out, and so i just thought i’d say so.
also, she’s shy about starting to blog herself, so i figure i’ll give her a little head start by adding her contribution to the public record of my capstone thinking.
hopefully, she won’t mind my sneakiness too much. :)

before you read any more, though, look at my pretty graduation flowers!

thanks, momma.
:)

(more…)

annotation is a list of metadata that we think should be attached
search is a list of the metadata that we hope is already attached

People have been organizing information for almost as long as they have been creating it. Ever since we learned that we could expand our memory and productivity by storing some pieces of information in the physical world – notching a stick to mark the passage of time, painting on a wall to tell a story, or knotting a rope to keep track of inventory – we have been accumulating bits and pieces of parchment, paper, and stone. The flipside of this is that as these things accumulated, we had to figure out somewhere to put them, and we had to do so in such a way that we could find them later. Externalization and organization go hand in hand; it doesn’t do much good to record something for later if we aren’t going to be able to find it when we need it.
Our early efforts at information technology evolved quickly, and we developed ever more sophisticated methods to aid us in the organization of our physical bits and pieces of information. We learned to identify the relevant attributes of each piece of information – who created it? what is it called? when was it created? what is it about? – and we created standards for ordering according to these attributes. We standardized the alphabet and the calendar, and we started to think hierarchically in order to reduce the number of feasible options at each stage of classification.
We built libraries, designed catalog systems, and started to see literacy as a skill worth spreading to every man, woman, and child.
Today, we all learn basic principles of organization – keep like things together

it is still beyond most of our capabilities, however, to organize an entire library. advances in organization have relied heavily on the work of librarians and scholars to annotate, update,

digital information makes things different

library and information professionals still have work to do, but we are no longer only keeping track of information that can be traced back to a discrete physical thing.
we are no longer just interested in the characteristics of the information in the public domain.
once i am able to have my own copy of a piece of information, the potential number of relevant attributes balloons.
we are all, in effect, keeping track of our own library.
and the ways that we use the information is changing.
all of our separately maintained piles of information become interlinkable, and the benefits of doing so are rather high.

we can all become librarians of our own information – the semantic web vision
we can continue to have different levels of organization for different kinds of information – professionally maintained libraries and catalogs, and our own stuff
we can build classification into our everyday interactions

haystack is about building collections, but still views these collections as aggregations of bits that are “located” elsewhere
it still sees place as separate from categorization
it is time-consuming

digital information often belongs in more than one category
this is difficult to represent visually
it’s hard to get a sense of “where” information is
what can we do about this?
we could try to make an exhaustive hierarchy
-this is hard and still doesn’t convey multiple locations very well
we could tag everything and see what structure emerges
-promising but labor intensive and still potentially overwhelming
we could focus on important kinds of relationships and design around those
-promising but suggests that different angles are useful in different contexts
we could identify several key angles and group around those
-promising but doesn’t give a sense of place
we could think of place as a cluster of tags

simple as that
;)

it’s not just that people like to personalize their systems; it’s also that they learn how to use it through personalization. not in terms of color and font, as much, but in terms of workflow. there are enough small variations between people’s work styles that all systems will be improved by an ability to adjust to these variations. this is why i am starting to believe that we should focus on improving the building blocks of interaction so that users are more able to basically build their systems themselves. i challenge the assumption that it is better design to assume what users want and try to cover all the bases. you never will.

vs. computational creativity
vs. one-user-at-a-time design

begun by asking:
what are our foundational challenges?
why do so many projects repeat themes? (like streamlining)

getting a quick sense of an information landscape would be HUGE for them

details of the landscape are always changing, so using specific points (folders or individual files) to anchor the metaphor is faulty.
but other landmarks, and most of all the rules for interpreting the maps, can be consistent, and provide the sense of findability that we need.

jeff talked about how writing leads us to see connections between our ideas that we weren’t aware of before.
these kinds of connections are what i want the computer to help reveal.
it’s related to triggering discoveries that we wouldn’t have found otherwise, like the experience of scanning a library shelf for one book but then finding better ones because the books are grouped together in a meaningful way. when we root around in our email, if related messages (in several senses of “related”) are near each other, our odds of tripping over useful stuff will increase.