Developing Usable Experiences

Organization systems and taxonomies

September 25th, 2008 11:18 pm —  16 views

A late night studying. Here we are again.

Tonight I worked on a DRAT1 homework assignment and did some reading in the book for Information Architecture. The chapter was on Organization Systems.

While I’m still digesting this chapter, I’m already get caught up in the ideas I’ve been reading in a book dealing with organization and categorization called, “Everything is Miscellaneous”2. In this book, the author describes the classical types of organizing that have all been based on physical objects or physical objects referring to locations of other physical objects. In what he calls the “third order or order”, or the digital order, a leaf of information can appear on any relevant branch. And relevancy is subjective…alas the spice.

For this DRAT assignment, we had to finish a script that fetches MySpace user’s page and retrieves links to that person’s friends. Through the magic of Perl, we retrieve the original person’s friend’s friends and spit all this out to a file showing who is friends with who.

The result was pretty interesting and described a pretty complex network of relationships.

Where is the organization system in this? Is there a taxonomy? The random seeming but organized result of this friend network is just cool.

Image: The network image of 773 friends of a friend of a stranger.

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  1. Data Retrieval and Analysis Techniques – SI 601 [↩]
  2. By David Weinburger. [↩]

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One Response to “Organization systems and taxonomies”

  1. Dawn on September 26th, 2008 11:34 am

    Ok, now I’m no longer feeling bad not to be in school anymore! :) This sounds way too complicated…but I do agree that everything is misc.

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