[Sigia-l] Findability is dead, Long live ummm... Meaning?

[George Olsen]

On 3/30/03 7:17 AM, "christina wodtke" <cwodtke at eleganthack.com> wrote:

> If we as IA's take apart content, removing it from
> structure, and chunk it into data bites, then repurpose it, what becomes of
> the satisfying whole of a page that a writer normally crafts?

I'm sure Mark Bernstein would disagree, but this is was major reason
interactive fiction (at least that I saw through the mid-90s) really sucked.
It was intellectually interesting at times, but usually unsatisfying -- sort
of like that Harold Pinter play that runs in reverse.

The folks who came from videogaming (like the seminal Chris Crawford) did
better in this regard -- they changed the emphasis to creating an
environment in which users could create their own stories. But that approach
ran into the same problem: they were missing that sense of possibilities
becoming probabilities becoming inevitabilities that makes traditional
narrative satisfying.

While these are problems mostly of fiction, they do offer cautionary tales
for non-fiction situations where you want to convey a clear message, whether
that's a company's brand message or teaching someone how to proper fix the
impellers on a marine diesel engine.

> How can we keep the writing from being mediocre, if it is a computer
> created combination of a set of modules crafted to be interchangeable?

Depends on how fine-grained things are. Trying to combine paragraphs doesn't
work -- hence the failure of "object-oriented journalism" that was hyped
awhile back, i.e. you'd combine automatically nuggets from various news
feeds and have a news story.

However, at a larger level it's done all the time. Look at the "package
coverage" of the war that most larger newspapers have. Generally each story
and sidebar can stand alone if needed, but combined they've got greater
value. But they still can be rearranged -- as proven by the different
formatting done  between print and web due to the limitations of each media.

The trick is both figuring out what level of detail works, and learning how
to write with it in mind. I might use a sidebar to go into more detail about
something, but I always wrote the main story to work even if the reader
never read the sidebar.

This approach actually translates well into common types of commercial
sites, such as product info. It's harder work on the writer, but it's
doable.

George