SIGIA-L Mail Archives: Re: SIGIA-L: what do you call that?
Re: SIGIA-L: what do you call that?
From: Christina Wodtke (cwodtke_at_eleganthack.com)
Date: Sun Feb 03 2002 - 11:52:10 EST
I like the concept though the term makes me nervous (being a lapsed
Buddhist, or rather an unready one)
from the archives of half-baked ideas:
I think I would rather talk about the phenomenology of an item....
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0807064734/
by returning to the poetics of space (we've been waxing philosophical these
days, haven't we). It's a hard book to read that is as valuable in its
insights into IA as A Pattern Language, for different reasons. The author
carefully lists aspects of spaces, and how we perceive them, what makes them
known and recognizable to us, and how they shape our thoughts.
I feel phenomenonology is a part of an IA's role. What is an item's
thingness? What makes a piece of meat known to us as meat? What associations
to it contain? How can we use those associations? and so on...
----- Original Message -----
From: "karl fast" <karl.fast_at_pobox.com>
To: "sigia" <sigia-l_at_asis.org>
Sent: Sunday, February 03, 2002 6:21 AM
Subject: Re: SIGIA-L: what do you call that?
> > Is there a specific terminology for talk about items that require
> > shelf-space and thus can only live in one spot at one time, vs.
> > something that requires no shelfspace and can live in multiple
> > places?
>
> You're describing differences between physical and virtual (ie:
> software) objects. I'm not sure about the terminology.
>
> Of course moving to an all virtual world doesn't necessarily solve
> your problems. You can still have what Fred Leise, at Argus, once
> described to me as "the Buddha nature problem."
>
> Consider Yahoo which is a large, pre-coordinated list of subject
> headings. Each time you add a new item to the directory you must
> determine where to put it. Fred described this as "the Buddha
> nature" problem. You must consider the new item and all possible
> locations for it in the hierarchy. Then you must determine its
> buddha nature--its one true resting place in the hierarchy. Once you
> do that, all other places become secondary and you make the
> necessary cross-references (which you want to keep to a minimum to
> reduce clutter and ease maintenance).
>
> In a post-coordinated scheme you don't have the same problem. You
> determine the discrete concepts which best describe the object.
> These concepts are represented by terms in a controlled vocabulary,
> often a thesaurus. This is where all that faceted classification
> stuff comes in. The "buddha nature" problem here becomes determining
> what the document is about and how to describe it, not where to put
> it.
>
> The important point about the pre-coordinated Yahoo! system is that
> you have to put your document somewhere, and then cross-reference.
>
> In a post-coordinated (eg: faceted) system you're not putting
> anything anywhere.
>
>
> I dunno if that helps or not. You probably know all this, but I've
> always liked Fred's "buddha nature" description of the problem.
>
> --karl
>
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