I enjoyed the new Lord of the Rings movie, Return of the King, but it was simply too long. I think the first two did a great job of not trying to convey everything in the books and simply be great movies. The last one is as well, until the ending, or endings I should say, as there are several of them, each longer than the last. And it was here that the movie tried to provide a grand ending to the entire trilogy instead of just providing closure to the story. And it was here that I could no longer concentrate, the urine backing up into my brain – despite my awesomely timed-trip to the restroom during the very last preview – where my last thoughts were, ‘How long can one bladder hold out? Is there a statistical average? If so, has this been pointed out to Hollywood film editors?‘
Author: Victor
Purple Dancing Hippo Sumo Wrestler
Oh how I wish I could dance like that.
Are there polar bears in space?
SpSt 515: Human Factors in Space, 3 Credits: A review of the major stresses experienced by humans on entering the new and alien environment of space. Examples will be taken from the psychological and physiological impacts experienced by U.S. and Soviet crews with emphasis on longer flights. How to avoid and/or overcome these stresses will be examined as an essential and growing need in the future development and settlement of the space frontier.
Review of SchemaLogic
Update to the post below, Anca has a review of SchemaLogic. ‘The primary use for SchemaServer right now seems to focus on Controlled
Vocabulary Management….Changes to a vocabulary can be made through an automated voting process.‘ Hmmmm, people across the enterprise voting on the vocab, I wonder what LIS people think of that? Link courtesy of Brett. Thanks Brett!
And how does that make you feel?
Navigate in Place
Check out the Dialtastic over at youngpup. It’s an example of the interaction design school of navigation.
Layer of Abstration
OK, you’ve got a taxonomy full of info you want a whole bunch of distributed, internal, business users to manage and a website that displays that taxonomy, but in a very particular way crafted to the needs of customers and controlled by a centralized web group because you don’t want to simply display the raw taxonomy cause that sucks for navigation much of the time, and somehow you must do the taxonomy dance to tweak how the taxonomy content flows into pages.
On back end, you store all metadata in faceted taxonomies – someone else’s smart decision that preceeded you – and on front end you combine some taxonomies to create a hierarchical view for browsing and within that display, content is displayed differently depending on info from other taxonomies, other values from other facets.
In order to do the taxonomy dance – massage taxonomy displays to be more navigable – you design a little two-screen interface to manage the display hierarchy (a technologist’s term for it, which I like), adding/deleting display categories (which are separate from the back end categories) and mapping children to parents.
A tricky part is that a lot of distributed people will be entering content, and only a few people will be doing the taxonomy dance. So those entering content won’t necessarily see the same categories that end up in the presentation, because dancing has altered it. How, you wonder, does one make this clear and comfortable for the content authors? This process of communicating with content authors using content management systems to manage a taxonomy catalog that is then displayed according to rules and an arbitrary user interface becomes a big, fat, juicy IA challenge.
Bella at St. Johns
If you live in the New York City area and are looking to learn more about IA and classification schemes, you might like Bella Hass Weinberg’s class at St. Johns University. This Spring it’s offered on Thursdays, 7-9pm. Bella is a world-class expert on indexing and thesaurus design. She can tell tales of the oddest indexes found in the most ancient texts. She works and writes constantly. She also wears, without peer, the most stunning hats.
IA Education
Taxonomy Dance Instructor
Having only recently contemplated the taxonomy dance, I’m now building a user interface to do it within a content management system. It’s nothing new, I see all the thesaurus software let’s you map categories to other categories. But some of those interfaces are soooooo bad, asking you to assign categories a number which corresponds to a level which is specified somewhere else. Eek. I’m curious to see how the new generation of products, like SchemaLogic, handle this. My kingdom for a screen shot.
Research-A-Palooza
As Tanya recently pointed out, sometimes you have to go down a research path just to find out if the path is of interest to you, sometimes having to backtrack. The UT School of Info had a little seminar which addressed this, at least on a community level. The Research-A-Palooza:
- Each person gets 90 seconds to describe one of his/her research threads, accompanied by one PowerPoint slide.
- When I change the slide to introduce the next person, you have 10 seconds to finish up.
- If you find me rude, please get over it.
Original powerpoint (10 megs!) and crude HTML rendering
Habitual Applications
Stowe Boyd on the challenges new Internet applications face being on the out rather than the in: ‘The final barrier I see to the productive application of social networking systems is that they are…being developed as standalone systems, divorced from the information technologies that businesses are already using to manage business relationships or relationship-related information. In my case, I spend a lot of time “in” Outlook and instant messaging clients of various flavors. The typical sales rep at a large company spends a lot of time “in” Siebel. A consultant in a professional sales firm spends much of her day “in” a project-oriented content management system, like eRoom or Sharepoint. A financial analyst at a brokerage firm “lives” in Bloomberg or Reuters information services. ‘
Sneaky User Testing
What happens when you unleash Paul Ford’s design and technology skills on a 150 year old magazine of literature, politics and culture? Harpers.org.
Paul also found a clever way to prototype the site: ‘It’s been noted that Harpers.org looks like Ftrain. It’s actually the other way around: Ftrain looks like Harpers.org. I’ve been using you, the Ftrain reader, as a guinea pig for about 5 months, testing ideas I developed for Harper’s, finding out what JavaScript worked in which browser, which interface ideas were too baffling to include, and seeing how you dealt with different sorts of links. Thanks for that.’
Then of course there’s all that semantic taxonomy hoohah, you’ll want to read about that too.
Preservation is Relative
Fran Lebowitz on Lever House:
“If you live here for more than five years, they’re going to tear down something you like. The invariable rule of thumb is that what they will put up is worse than what they tore down, even if what they tore down is terrible. I mean, I was once with a man who was asked during the course of the time I was with him to sign a petition to keep them from tearing down Lever House and he signed it. He’s a much older man and he turned to me and said, ‘You know, I remember signing a petition to keep them from putting up Lever House.’ And that is the story of anyone who has lived in New York long enough.”
IA as Conversation
In the past I’ve wondered about how taxonomies become navigation and did the taxonomy dance to match the bottom-up to the top-down, and now I wonder if this whole way of thinking about information architecture is flawed. Maybe the bottom-up of organizing information can never match the top-down of the user’s goals because we’re thinking about it wrong. Here’s my line of reasoning:
- Design is about people. Design is done by people to benefit people.
- Content is just the outward expression of the designer.
- The reader is ultimately interacting with the designer. This interaction happens via the content. With all the technology and information before us, it’s easy to forget this interaction is about people talking to each other.
- Information architecture could be thought of as facilitating conversation among people.
- IA could benefit from techniques that help people interact well.
- In a conversation, one can merely hear the other party, the two parties can each talk about themselves, or each can listen with empathy, ask questions, and build on each other’s comments.
How might this translate to designing information architecture? The design of social software comes immediately to mind. But I think this can have implications for good old navigation too.