[Sigia-l] card sorting: dealing with multiple placements

[Todd R.Warfel]

On Thursday, May 29, 2003, at 07:38 PM, Boniface Lau wrote:

> The fact is that card sorter was invented in the late 19th century to
> sort census punched cards. Thus, the tool was intended for ordering.

I'll take your word for it that it was originally invented in the 19th 
century to sort census punched cards, although I would be interested to 
know where you found that information. I'm not familiar with how it was 
used for census punched cards, so I can't argue towards ordering or 
grouping there. However, I do know that IBM made card sorting popular 
for IA as a means of grouping.

As card sorting relates to IA as a practice it is for grouping, not 
ordering. Grouping is a higher level in the organizational hierarchy 
than ordering. It's an IA's job to create the orders from the groupings 
established from a card sort. Or in the case of IBM's EZSort, the 
program does the ordering based on the groupings made by the 
participants.

I think we can both agree that the end result is an order, or 
potentially something even more finite. However, my point is that the 
card sorts are not for ordering, they're for grouping. It's the groups 
from the card sorts that are the basis for the orderings done by an IA.

> BTW, many years later John von Neumann wrote a sort program and used
> the card sorter as performance benchmark.

For what?

> History aside, arguing that card sorting was not meant for ordering
> things is like arguing that sorting was not meant for ordering. It
> ignores the established meaning of words.

I don't agree. Sorting is meant for grouping - grouping is meant for 
ordering. Ordering is more granular, it's further down the chain.

In a basic taxonomy it goes something like this 
inventory>kingdom>phylum (group, 
division)>class>order>family>genus>species

Card sorting isn't meant to ask people to define the order. It's meant 
to get people to define the groups (phylum, division), which is a level 
or two above order. Then we, as IAs, create the order.

Cheers!

Todd R. Warfel

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