[Sigia-l] mixing apples and oranges and tomatoes

[Cunliffe D J (Comp)]

Hello List & Katherine,

'Sorting Things Out' by Geoffrey C. Bowker, Susan Leigh Star is an
interesting read on some of these issues and other related ones.

Less by way of help and more by way of throwing fuel on the fire...

It seems to me that what you are faced with is the fallacy of a single
perfect hierarchy in which every 'thing' can be uniquely placed - a place
for everything and everything in its place.
   
Thus a strictly science-based hierarchy would suggest that tomatoes are
fruit, end of discussion.

A commonsense (user-based?)  approach would suggest that tomatoes are
vegetables, mushrooms (which are neither fruit nor vegetables) are
vegetables and plantain (which look like bananas) are in fact vegetables.
Though I must admit that I am personally uncomfortable with the idea that
lettuce are vegetables - to my mind there needs to be another category of
'salad stuff' :-) When I go to my local supermarket I find the tomatoes with
the vegetables (actually with the other 'salad stuff') - except the organic
tomatoes which are with the 'organic fruit and vegetables and salad stuff'
which I find very irritating. If I go to the vegetable section and there are
no tomatoes I am never going to check the fruit section just in case. The
use of a hierarchy should enable users to find things where they expect them
and to know that if they don't find them there, they won't be anywhere else.
Things should be where your users expect them to be.

If users expect things to be in more than one place (or different user
groups will expect them to be in different places) then why not put them in
both places? We are not dealing with physical items so it is easy. Small
maintenance issue, but happy customers.

To my mind one of the powerful potentials for hypermedia is precisely that
we can express -multiple- hierarchies over the same content to suit
different users and different tasks. Personally I would like my supermarket
ordered by weight and fragility, so all the heavy items are at the start of
the shop and all the delicate breakable items are at the end so that I don't
break stuff in my trolley.

I think supermarkets are actually a really nice (but not necessarily good)
example of IA in practice.

Milk and butter are next to each other because they are dairy products,
margarine is next to butter because they are both spread on bread, but bread
is in the bakery section with the eggs. Organic eggs are with the eggs, but
organic tea is with other organic products in the tinned foods section.
Certain goods and promotions are placed on the ends of isles to catch people
who don't go down the isle, or by the tills. 

A colleague has just pointed out that for example crisps and beer are often
put together in order to create new associations.

My office mate has just informed me that strawberries aren't fruit
(something to do with having seeds on the outside) - now I am really
confused.

"The chemists should have a particularly interesting time, for their morass
of hundreds of thousands of compounds will be interconnected, not merely by
chemical analogy, but also by chosen physical properties, therapeutic
action, and the like..."  V. Bush

Time for a lie down,

Daniel.