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

[Peter Morville]

Just to be clear, Andrew Dillon explicitly attacked findability in the
spatial navigation panel using a similar argument (though at least I
don't think even Andrew wanted findability to die).

In any case, I disagree that findability is limited to known-item
searching.  People may be trying to find answers to questions or
solutions to problems without knowing whether those answers or solutions
exist.

Also, in my experience, most understanding comes from reading *found*
documents or using *found* applications, though some understanding can
come from the surrounding structure and relationships, and doctoral
students can attest to the understanding gained by NOT FINDING
information on a particular topic.


Peter Morville
President, Semantic Studios
www.semanticstudios.com


-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-admin at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-admin at asis.org] On Behalf
Of Peter Merholz
Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2003 3:38 PM
To: SIGIA
Subject: [Sigia-l] Findability is dead, Long live ummm... Meaning?


So, at the now infamous Spatial Navigation Panel Thing, I dashed off
this note to myself, which I titled "Findability -- context -- meaning":

     The problem with findability is that it favors known-item
searching.
     There is a Thing out there, and you develop a space to help people
find
     that Thing. This elevates certain types of cues ‹ navigation,
metaphor,
     classification.

     BUT, in my experience, most information tasks aren¹t about finding
‹
     they¹re about understanding. And understanding is built through
     relationships, connections, meaning... SEMANTICS.  And so, as
     information architects, we need to design systems that treat those
     issues ‹ facets, linking, hyperlinks, relationships.

A few more thoughts about this...

There's nothing wrong with supporting known-item searching. It's a big
hairy problem, and a valuable one to solve.

Supporting "understanding" is really hard to define. It's squishy.
Vague. Easy to interpret in a number of different ways. This doesn't
mean we shouldn't try; it means that we should expect this to be a long,
hard, arduous process. 

At the summit, we saw some early and interesting attempts at supporting
'understanding' - Celia Romaniuk's talk on FOAF and "Eastenders", or
Brett Lider's presentation on enterprise ontologies.

Not like we don't already have too much stuff to keep up on, but the IA
community needs a firmer grounding in hypertext and hypertext research.
The Web is still a whole lot about 'the link', and the Hypertext
Community has been thinking about this a lot longer than we have. Some
ones I've found with a wee bit o' the Google
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~barman/HT96/
http://www.fxpal.com/PapersAndAbstracts/papers/gol97a/
http://www.mri.mq.edu.au/~mariam/flexht/program.html
http://portal.acm.org/browse_dl.cfm?linked=1&part=series&idx=SERIES399&c
oll=
portal&dl=ACM&CFID=9201358&CFTOKEN=21750743

Lookit this:
http://tinyurl.com/8ank
"Semantics happen: knowledge building in spatial hypertext"

Oh, and then there's that whole distinguishing between unhelpful
metaphors (those which are too literal and thus constraining) and
helpful metaphors (metaphors in the more Lakoff-ian sense, metaphors
that help us understand 'semantic processing').

The more we know, the more we know we don't know.

--peter



------------
When replying, please *trim your post* as much as possible. *Plain text,
please; NO Attachments

ASIST IA 03 Summit: Making Connections
http://www.asist-events.org/IASummit2003/

Searchable list archive:   http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/
________________________________________
Sigia-l mailing list -- post to: Sigia-l at asis.org
Changes to subscription: http://mail.asis.org/mailman/listinfo/sigia-l