5/14/2014

U N I V E R S I T Y O F C A L I F O R N I A , B E R K E L E Y S C H O O L O F I N F O R M A T I O N

THE DISCIPLINE OF ORGANIZING

Robert J. Glushko [email protected] @rjglushko DisciplineOfOrganizing.org DisciplineOfOrganizing org 14 May 2014 Society for Technical Communication Berkeley Chapter

Today’s Talk •

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Project Motivation

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The “Organizing System”

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Design Dimensions and Frameworks for Organizing Systems The Book Book, eBooks eBooks, Customization, and Collaboration 2

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Project Motivation (Personal) 

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In our daily lives organizing is a fundamental cognitive activity that we often do without thinking much about it It is also an important part of most business and professional activities Organizing in any context can be more effective and satisfying if we are more self-aware and systematic about how we organize

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Bob’s Garage

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www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/08/24/the-man-who-organized-everything/UTtZQUsA6BClX1YLF2Vk7L/story.html

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My Interests in Books and Ebooks • I first fi t transformed t f d printed i t d texts t t into i t “electronic books” over 30 years ago • About 15 years ago I stopped doing it • Until last year, when a project to write a textbook turned into a project to create an “etextbook” • I thought that by now everything about making ebooks would have been figured out… but it isn’t 6

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Project Motivation (Generic) Making sense of the world is to organize it… 

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Categorization (Creating “equivalence equivalence classes classes” of resources that we treat the same) Classification (Creating models for assigning resources to existing categories) Integration (Combining categories) Segmentation S t ti (Discovering (Di i categories t i computationally, assigning resources to them) Recommendation (Selecting resources according to explicit or implicit preferences) …

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Project Motivation (Professional) • Teaching the UC Berkeley School of Information “gateway” course since 2005 • The 60 ISchools include schools of library science, informatics, MIS, computer science… related but different emphases, domains, student populations, typical employers • No textbook exists that can survey this field, so my “foundations” “f d ti ” course syllabus ll b h had d no unifying point of view, and even contained some conflicts

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The Undefined Intersection Library & Information Science Information Organization Information Architecture Public Sector “Memory Institutions” 

Computer Computer Science Science Informatics

Information Content Mgmt Retrieval & Information Retrieval et e a

B i Business &

Business & Technology Technology

No textbook existed that focused on their intersection, their intellectual core 12

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Organizing 

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Organizing : Creating capabilities by intentionally imposing order and structure We organize :  Things  Information  Information about Things  Information about Information about {Things, Information} … 13

We Organize… 

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Libraries, museums, Libraries museums business information systems, scientific data… and other institutional resource collections Different types of documents – from narrative to transactional – which have characteristic content structures, content, structures and presentations

• Personal information and artifacts of all kinds in our kitchens, closets, personal computers, smartphones… 14

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Motivating the Concept of “Organizing System” 

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We can emphasize how all of these domains and types of collections differ… or we can emphasize what they have in common They are all “Organizing Systems” A collection of resources intentionally arranged to enable some set of interactions 16

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Key Concepts of Organizing [1] 

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RESOURCES are “anything of value that can support goal-oriented activity” A COLLECTION is a group of resources that have been selected for some purpose

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Key Concepts of Organizing [2] 

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INTENTIONAL ARRANGEMENT captures th idea the id th thatt th the system t requires i explicit li it or implicit acts of organization by AGENTS – human or computational ones If the organization isn’t intentional, we can’t reuse or recreate it with our own efforts (So we’re excluding arrangements and collections that are created by natural processes or that are illusory) 18

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Arranged, But Not Intentionally Organized

Photo by B. Rosen (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rosengrant/2966470172/) CC BY-ND 2.0

Apparent Arrangement, but not Organized

Orion’s Belt: Alnitak (736 LY), Alnilam (1340LY), Mintaka (915 LY)

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Organizing Principles [1] • Almost any property of a resource might be used as a basis for its arrangement, and multiple properties are often used simultaneously • For physical resources the properties are often perceptual, material ones, or task-oriented ones • For information resources the properties are often semantic ones • Some principles are domain-specific, but others can apply generally 21

Organizing Books By Content (LOC Classification)

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Photo by Jeffrey Beall (http://www.flickr.com/photos/denverjeffrey/304220561) Creative Commons CC BY-ND 2.0

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Organizing Spices by Cuisine

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Organizing Principles [2] 

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Other typical arrangements are based on ownership, origin, taxonomic, or “taskonomic” properties (usage frequency, correlated usage) Any resource with a orderable name or identifier can have alphabetic or numeric ordering Any resource with an associated date (creation, acquisition) can have chronological ordering

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Organizing People by Work Role

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Organizing People by Family, Religion, Class, Race, Year of Death…

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The Best Principles don’t Specify Implementation: “Organize Spices Alphabetically”

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The Three-Tier Architecture Organizing Principles should be logically separated p from Implementation and Presentation considerations 28

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The Activities in Organizing Systems 

We can identify four activities in the lifecycle of every organizing system: 

Selecting resources

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Organizing resources

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Supporting resource-based interactions and services Maintaining resources

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An Organized Closet

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Activities in a Closet Organizing System… 

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Selecting: Should I hang up my sweaters in the closet or put them in a drawer? Organizing: Should I sort my shirts by color, sleeve type, or season? Supporting Interactions: Do I need separate places for laundry or dry cleaning? Maintaining: Should I toss out my clothes only when they wear out, based on how long I’ve owned them, or based on whether I’m tired of them? 31

Activities in a Data Warehouse Organizing System… 

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Selecting: which data sources should be included? How is their quality assessed? Organizing: which data formats and schemas will enable effective processing? Are needed transformations made at load time or query time? Supporting Interactions: what are the most important and frequent queries that need to be pre-configured? Maintaining: data governance… retention, compliance, privacy issues 32

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Stop and Reflect… 

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Using g abstract terms like “resource,” “interaction,” and “maintenance” instead of more specific and domain-specific terms is a pre-requisite for defining a new discipline of organizing Collection development, Appraisal vs.. Selecting Acquisition, Accession, Ingesting, Integration vs.. Adding to Collection

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Cataloging, Indexing, Mashup vs.. Organizing

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Curation, Governance vs.. Maintenance … 33

Resources… In the Library? y

In the Zoo?

On the Web: Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs) 34

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Organizing Organizing Systems [1] • We can classify organizing systems by:

• resource type • dominant purpose • creator • size of intended user community • or many other ways

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Categorizing by Resource Type

Organizing Systems

Collections of Books (Libraries)

Collections of Art (Museum)

Collections of Documents (Archive)

Collections of Data (Repository)

Collections of Spices (Pantry) …

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Categorizing by Purpose: Resource Preservation as Means vs.. End Organizing Systems

Memory Institutions

Libraries

Museums

Business Info Systems

Archives

Content Management

CRM

ERP

Corollary Distinction: Preserving Instances or Preserving Types? 37

Organizing Organizing Systems [2] • Manyy more categorizations: g • Personal collections vs.. institutional collections • Location of the user community • Technology used •… • But these classifications overlap without clear boundaries or necessary and sufficient features 38

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What is a Library? • A collection of resources • Organized to enable “access” and “reuse” • Curated for “public good” and “community creation” • Conventional interaction is “circulation” – borrowing and return of resources resources…

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A Library

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A Library?

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A Library?

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A Library?

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Consequences of Category Thinking 

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Many types of resource collections have conventional ti l characteristics h t i ti th thatt are d deeply l embedded in cultural and linguistic categories Using an established category to describe an organizing system reinforces these characteristics, even if we add qualifiers … and d marginalizes i li any atypical t i l characteristics h t i ti of the organizing system being categorized The categorization of an organizing system can be contentious – is Google Books a library? 44

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A “Design Space” or “Dimensional” Perspective

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In addition to using categories like Library or Museum or Business Information System, consider a specific organizing system as a point in a multidimensional design space and these categories as regions in that space... This treats the familiar categories as “design patterns” that embody typical configurations of design choices 45

Consequences of Dimensional Thinking 

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Overcomes the bias and conservatism inherent in familiar categories Design patterns support multi-disciplinary work that cuts across familiar categories and applies knowledge about them to new domains Creates a design g vocabulary y for translating g concepts and concerns from category and discipline-specific vocabularies

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The 5 Dimensions of an Organizing System 1. What Is Being Organized? 2. Why Is It Being Organized? 3. How Much Is It Being Organized? 4 When Is It Being Organized? 4. 5. Who (or What) is Organizing It?

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1. What Is Being Organized? •Identifying the unit of analysis is a central problem in every intellectual or scientific discipline - and in every organizing system •Resources that are aggregates or composites of other resources, or that have internal structure, or th t can h that have many attributes, tt ib t pose questions ti about the granularity of their "thingness”

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How Many Things is a Car?

When you build it? When you sell it? When you repair it?

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“Thing” vs.. “Type of Thing” 

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Oops... we have been blurring the distinction Oops between individual things or instances of things and classes of things We often say that that two objects are the "same thing" when we mean they are the same "type of g thing" Identifying a resource as an instance is not the same as identifying the category or "equivalence class" to which it belongs 50

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What is Macbeth?

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“Shamu” -- Instance or Type?

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Institutional Categorization • Explicit construction of a semantic model of a domain to enable more control, robustness, and interoperability than is possible with just the cultural system • Essential in abstract, information-intensive domains where semantic precision is essential for processes and transactions ((especially p p y automated ones) • Often the collaborative artifact of many individuals who represent different organizational or business perspectives 53

Library of Congress Classification

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Institutional != Unbiased • Creating g institutional categories g by y more systematic processes than cultural or individual categories does not prevent them from being biased • Indeed, the goal of institutional categories is often to impose or incentivize biases in interpretation or behavior

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Top Level BISAC Categories … the “Dewey Dilemma”

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CAFE Categories: Find the Trucks

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Making 9 Million Jobless People Vanish

When you give up looking for a job, you’re not unemployed

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Resource Focus • We often designate some resource as primary because it is the focus of our attention • We often create other resources that are descriptions of or otherwise associated with the primary resource Description resources” resources (a more • We call these “Description general term than “metadata”) • The descriptions of a resource can be packaged as a set or expressed as single statements 59

Description Resources

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Fantasy Football: One Person’s Description is another Person’s Resource

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2. Why Is It Being Organized? •The essential purpose of every Organizing System is to "bring like things together and differentiating among them” – enabling generic requirements of resource discovery, identification, access… •But there are always more precise requirements and constraints to satisfy and more specific kinds of interactions to support •Different stakeholders might not agree on these requirements, making it necessary to use multiple and possibly incompatible resource descriptions and organizing principles 63

Interactions –The Why of Organizing Systems 

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INTERACTIONS include any activity, activity function function, or service supported by or enabled with respect to the resources in a collection or with respect the collection as a whole Interactions can include access, reuse, copying, transforming, g translating, g comparing, p g combining, g visualizing, recommending… anything that a person or process can do with the resources…

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Interactions 

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Some interactions can be enabled with any type of resource, while hil others th are ti tied d tto resource ttypes Interaction can be direct, mediated or indirect, or limited to interactions with resource copies or descriptions The supported interactions depend on the nature and d extent t t off the th resource descriptions d i ti and d arrangement Finding the optimal descriptions is an important goal but not always possible 65

But Description is Challenging! 

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People use different words for the same things, and the same words for different things - what would a "good" description be like, and how can it be created or discovered? Describing and organizing always (explicitly or implicitly) takes place in some context The context shapes which resource properties are important and the organizing principles that use those properties, introducing bias

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Organizing Books by Color Trading aesthetics for scalability in organization and retrieval

Photo by See-ming Lee (http://www.flickr.com/photos/seeminglee/4556156477) Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0 license

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A DJ Organizes His Records – Beats per Minute

Photo by Matt Earp aka Kid kameleon

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Classifying Resource Properties

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Organizing System: Home Kitchen

Photo by Emilie Hardman (http://www.flickr.com/photos/quintanaroo/2741672230//) Used by permission

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Resource Properties for Kitchen Organization •Intrinsic static p properties: p Store y your pots, p , frying y g pans, and baking pans in different cabinets and nest each set by size • Extrinsic static properties: A spice rack with the spices arranged in alphabetical order • Intrinsic I t i i dynamic d i properties ti Arranging A i your milk ilk and d other perishable goods by expiration date, a “useful life remaining” property that decreases to zero over time • Extrinsic dynamic properties if you put the most frequently used condiments or spices in the front 71

Resource Properties for Document Organization •Intrinsic static properties: Author, Author date published, words in the text • Extrinsic static properties: ISBN, LOC Classifications • Intrinsic I t i i dynamic d i properties ti Effectivity Eff ti it (e.g., ( laws and regulations) • Extrinsic dynamic properties Links/citations to and from other documents 72

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3. How Much Is It Being Organized? •Not everything is equally organizable organizable, because not everything is equally describable •A controlled vocabulary can yield more consistent organization •Are you organizing the resources you have, or do you need to create an organizing system that can apply to resources that you have not yet collected? ? •The scope and size of a collection shapes how much it needs to be organized • Making resources “smart” increases how much they can be organized 73

Scope and Scale SCOPE: the breadth and variety of resource types  SCALE: the number of resource instances 

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Heterogeneity of resources is more important than absolute number (Scope >> Scale) Handling resource heterogeneity:  Fewer, broader categories  Less description  Automated description and classification

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An Organizing System with Global Scope and Scale

An Organizing System with Narrow Scope and Scale

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Resource Agency •

Most resources are passive or operand resources ("nouns") that must be acted upon or interacted with to produce an effect

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Active or operant resources ("verbs") create effects or value on their own, sometimes by initiating interactions with operand resources

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Passive resources can become active if they are augmented with sensing, computational, or communication capabilities

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Smart Resources

Swiss Cows Send Texts to Announce They’re in Heat NY Times 1 October 2012

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4. When Is It Being Organized? •When the resource is created •When it is added to some collection •Just in time •Never •All the time - continuous or incremental 79

“Just in Case” Organization

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Postponing Organization

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5. Who or What Is Organizing? •Authors or creators •Professional organizers •Users “in the wild” •Users "in institutional contexts“ •Automated or computerized processes 82

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Summary • Th The conceptt off Organizing O i i System S t unifies ifi a vastt body b d of design and analysis practice from many disciplines • Thinking in terms of design dimensions overcomes the limitations and inertia of the traditional categories • It is a generative, forward-looking approach that encourages and accommodates innovation while preserving conventional theory and practice as design patterns • It enables intelligent conversations between people who didn’t have much common language before 83

For More About TDO http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/08/24/thehtt // b t l b /id /2013/08/24/th man-who-organizedeverything/UTtZQUsA6BClX1YLF2Vk7L/story.html http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Oct13/OctNov13_Glushko.pdf You can get a discounted print edition: 30% off from MIT Press with discount code GLD030 at https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/discipline-organizing 84

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TDO Book and eBooks 

“The The Discipline of Organizing Organizing” was published by MIT Press in May 2013 simultaneously in several different formats: 

As a traditional printed book

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As an ebook in epub2 and mobi formats

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We will be publishing new ebook editions at least twice a year… 85

What Makes a Text Multidisciplinary? • Id Identifies tifi and d explains l i the th concepts t att the th intersection of multiple disciplines • Uses vocabulary that is discipline-neutral to provide a language for interdisciplinary communication • IIncorporates t discipline-specific di i li ifi concepts t and d examples in the context of the transdisciplinary content and vocabulary

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Authoring a Multidisciplinary Text • Who Wh can write it it? • Where would you start? • Multidisciplinary implies collaboration - How would you coordinate and collaborate? • What document architecture provides appropriate support for authoring, deployment, effective comprehension, and maintenance? 87

Writing A Multidisciplinary Text • It matters tt where h you start t t • Initial drafts overly emphasized my own perspective because I hadn’t identified TDO as the intersection • Recruited critics and collaborators to fill in my di i li disciplinary gaps • Using the draft book at different ISchools purged disciplinary bias and broadened the coverage • The book grew bigger and bigger and bigger… 88

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Collaborative Authoring (and Resource Sharing) Environments •A As collaborative ll b ti writing iti and d tteaching hi iincreased, d we needed some way to support that • Initially we used generic technology (MS Word, email, Dropbox, Skype) rather than tools with book-specific collaboration functionality because of the diversity of shared resources • Later on we used (as beta testers) O’Reilly’s Atlas single-source publishing system for the publishing work • Resource sharing is DisciplineOfOrganizing.org 89

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From Word to XML •W We initially i iti ll used d Word W d as the th authoring th i software ft because that made it easy to solicit collaborators and reviewers • But as got closer to production, we saw that XML would enable more automation, configurability, and capability • Some of our markup has no use in the print version, but is especially valuable in ebooks and in “open data / semantic web” contexts 92

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The Breadth vs.. Depth Challenge • A BROAD ttextbook tb k for f a multidisciplinary ltidi i li field represents all the disciplines that contribute to it • A DEEP textbook treats all the disciplines with rigor and nuance Can a textbook be deep and broad at the same time? 93

Attacking the Breadth vs.. Depth Challenge • We W had h db been bl bloating ti th the b book k with ith disciplinary nuance that made the book more credible to experts but made it less accessible for students • The solution turned out to have ancient roots in book design that we have adapted to ebooks

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Selective Inclusion of Supplemental Content • The simplest mechanism for a personalized reading experience • A reader gets the content and (logically) includes it in the “text stream” • Example: with footnotes footnotes, endnotes, endnotes glossary terms, bibliographic references, visual or hypertextual inclusion is an optional act by the reader 95

Endnote Markers in Print

ENDNOTES MARKED WITH NUMBERED SUPERSCRIPTS Link following “by hand and eye” – turning to the notes section at end of each chapter 96

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Using “Tagged Content” to Address the “Breadth” vs.. “Depth” Challenge • About 24% of the content in TDO was converted to endnotes tagged by discipline • Reader can use these tags to decide whether or not to read the note • Useful in both p print and ebooks but radically y different user experiences

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Tagged Endnotes in Print Book (at end of each chapter)

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Pop-up “Web” Note in eBook

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The First Editions • The first print and ebook digital editions (epub and Ki dl mobi) Kindle bi) were produced d d ffrom the h same source files using the O'Reilly Atlas publishing system • They are essentially identical except for the interactions like search and hyperlinking that are intrinsic to the digital formats

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Resisting the Siren of Single-Sourcing • Without With t Atlas Atl we wouldn’t ld ’t have h been b able bl tto publish print and ebook versions simultaneously • But single-sourcing with transformation of print-oriented content to ebook formats can lull you into authoring the book for print and treating the ebook versions as free afterthoughts • Your ebooks won’t take advantage of their “e” 101

Investing in Markup • We W decided d id d tto iinvestt h heavily il iin markup k th thatt was not used in the print version • We can produce enhanced ebooks now • And this will be even more valuable in “open data” or “semantic data semantic web web” contexts in the future

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The Enhanced Academic Edition (for textbook use) • Accessible captions for all non-text components • 30 photos with detailed captions • “Quiz mode" that transforms the "Key Points" at the end of Chapters 2-10 into interactive question and answer pairs • Additional case studies in a new Chapter 11

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eBook Exploitable Markup Which activities are common to all organizing systems? Selection, organizing, interaction design, and maintenance activities occur in every organizing system. See .

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Only Answers Appear in Print Book

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eBook Exploitable Markup