Vacuum

Categorization and its discontents

Wikipedia is going through one of its periodic existential crises, this time over the use of categories. A diligent editor created a category of "American women novelists" and began adding female novelists to it, and then removing them from the category "American novelists". A predictable hue and cry ensued. James Gleick tells the story in some detail in the NY Review of Books, under the title "Wikipedia's Women Problem".

Categorization is hard in a Wikipedia world. The namespace for articles is flat, so there's no implicit categories assigned simply by what a page is named. On the other hand, categories can contain subcategories, and the Wikipedia editors take advantage of this to create elaborate categorical structures. Everything is part of something else, in some extended rhetorical tangle. (The image is from the article Wikipedia:Categorization.)

Categories don't have to have subcategories, of course; that's a convention that's not universal to all wiki software. Localwiki's equivalent structure looks more like tags, and tags are in one big flat namespace with no explicit hierarchy.

Fundamentally the choice is how to best improve findability of articles, and how to incorporate a distinctive feel to a system. Wikipedia has "Category:Doughnuts", with one subcategory "Doughnut shops" which in turn has a subcategory "Tim Hortons" which in turn has 12 pages, including Timbits. Arborwiki has a page Donuts, which includes pages tagged with the tag "donuts", and is in turn tagged as "Pastries that are not strange". (And yes, there is a "Pastries that are strange" tag as well.)

Wikipedia has a problem when the technically correct task of splitting a big category into smaller parts runs smack into the political minefield of deciding which part of the category is to be primary and which is to be secondary. No one wants to be secondary, and no reasonable system would always yield category warring. Perhaps Wikipedia has bumped up against some size limit where it's impossible for any one person to understand the complexity of the classification system it has built.

Related articles

Wikipedia bumps women from 'American novelists' category

Wikipedia working to get rid of women in category: American novelists

What's In A Category? 'Women Novelists' Sparks Wiki-Controversy

American novelists are dudes, according to wikipedia

Is Wikipedia Ghettoizing Female Writers?

Wikipedia's Sexism - NYTimes.com

[eim][misc] Too big to categorize

Losing the categorical imperative

What's In A Category? 'Women Novelists' Sparks Wiki-Controversy

Typepad on iPad, edited elsewhere

No support for rich text editing in safari, but otherwise performant. Kind of nice.

I'll need to really learn markdown for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that it descends from setext.

Ann Arbor

A2B3 lunch is Thursday as always. Ann Arbor Parks did trick or treat today, Sunday, noon to 4pm on the Huron River.

Arborwiki makes a good companion as you go for errands around town. Ann Arbor City Council elections and a millage are coming up. The Ann Arbor Chronicle has characteristically thorough coverage of the League of Women Voters forums. Some project, not yet identified, has North Main torn up at Catherine. A second project has North Division down to a single lane. Expect delays.

No one was hurt in last week's fire on Harpst. I'm trying a neighborhood LinkedIn group to see what kind of density I need to get enough people to make a group worthwhile; it might make sense to grab people closest first and then out by distance.

Metro Detroit

Tigers lost in the ALCS, and I'm looking forward to spring training.

Power outages from the Saturday windstorms were worst in Warren.

National

Occupy Chicago has had a lot of protest, via the Chicago Tribune which was on the scene.

Occupy Wall Street took over Times Square.

Living

I am tracking steps with a pedometer again, thanks to Paul Resnick and a research group at UMSI. Statler and Waldorf have taken over the Muppets twitter account. New movie due for Thanksgiving. Cue the Muppets.

Recipes

The wind on Saturday made farmers market blustery. Squash of all sizes and varieties were there, and there's nothing like a big old Hubbard squash to keep the corner of a table down. A farmer was doing the frost dance but said they had none at the last full moon. Traditionally, it's said that the best way to open a Hubbard is to take an axe to it, or to throw it down into the cellar.

Working

It's hard to have great weird ideas when you are closing trouble tickets. My new employer Nutshell has an office where my former employer Pure Visibility used to have it's offices.

Obituaries

Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie, Einar Steffrud.

Books

Books moved recently include Kawabata's, Snow Country, to be shelved on the Heikki Lunta shelf to prepare me for winter.

Tech

Pinboard now supports Gopher urls in bookmarks.

Sports

Michigan football lost to State. It was as good an excuse as any to call my aunt who went to East Lansing.

Meta

Wow, I have a lot of categories.

System mapping

It's always good to collect a lot of examples as you look to map out a system. For that you want to have generative tools that suggest the kinds of examples that you want to look for.

The power outage maps I have been collecting started with the generative system of making a blank entry for each of 50 states, and looking to collect one in each state. I've done similar exercises where the generator is the first letter of the alphabet collecting examples A-Z. You are looking for breadth in your view, and something that constrains the search so that you don't spend too much time in one place before going on.

It helps to have some kind of rudimentary ranking algorithm when wrapping up your search, so that you can look for gaps into which another example will fit. The utility map effort looks like it's going to generate a simple checklist for each map, so that I can give each one a score on completeness (0 = no map, add 1 for county by county stats, add 1 for city by city stats, add 1 for zoom to the outage, add 1 for systemwide counts etc).

Put the things you collect into categories that have names, so that you can start working with abstractions instead of concrete instances. The list of categories becomes another place to generate a bounded set of additional elements.

Once you have all of these you can start to think about plausible things that might be in the system that you haven't found yet. My piece on "unknowledge management" (the phrase is from Tom Munnecke) where the task becomes looking for names for things that don't exist yet but that might plausibly exist given the system that you have described. This means that you end up with something peculiar to search for, and either it doesn't exist yet, it can't exist (and your models are off), or you find it.

So the iterative process looks like

describe a search space

collect examples

rank along common attributes

categorize into abstractions

synthesize the undiscovered instances

and that seems to be as good a plan as any for survey of the field.

This food system map of Baltimore looks like an instance of the structure of this work. In academia, the survey article (Google Scholar) is structured in much the same way.

Holdridge vegetation classification system

Another triangle, this one found in a University of Michigan Global Change lecture on the Tropical Rain Forest, by George Kling. 

The triangle is the "Holdridge triangle", dating to 1947. 

• Holdridge, L.R. (1947) Determination of world plant formations from simple climatic data. Science, 105, 367--368.

All materials © the Regents of the University of Michigan unless noted otherwise.

Alas, poor delicious, you knew us well

The scuttlebutt is that delicious is going to be axed by Yahoo. 

Once upon a time, I bookmarked everything interesting that came across my path to delicious (back when it was del.icio.us).  It was part of my routine, and a daily summary was posted through to this blog.

Delicious was from the tags era of the Internet, where in addition to noting that a thing existed you could add your own tags to describe it. Sometimes these were straightforward tags, like the 1533 pages I marked as "annarbor". Others were idiosyncratic, like the 5 pages I marked as "attention-to-irrelevant-details".

There are other, better ways to bookmark things so that lots of people see them. The facebook "like" button gets more page views without consuming any cognitive overhead about how to tag, whether to tag, and what you've tagged before. Actually writing about something is quite a bit better than just bookmarking it, because you get to be yourself for a little while and not just an automaton forwarding on links automatically.

Every bookmark I ever did on delicious, up until now, is archived for posterity here: vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/delicious-20101216.htm . As I review it, there really should have been more of them marked "attention to irrelevant details". It's hours of reading, though some of it goes by fast because the site that was linked to has disappeared, leaving only the bookmark and whatever clipping I managed to care about.

edit: now with more cognitive overhead

more delicious:

Les Orchard, Let a million bookmarks bloom. "Use the web. Host your own, pay for it, or find someone who values your data."

Stephen Hood, We can save Delicious, but probably not in the way you think. "The Delicious user community could organize to save the data themselves via a coordinated harvesting project." 

Edward Vielmetti is http://www.delicious.com/vielmetti.

finding buckets to refill regularly

Much of the writing I do these days has tags but not much in the way of categories. There are a few very broad categories that things can go into, but not much in the way of narrow ones, and the world of tags means that you can always think up one more new tag to apply rather than revisiting an old one.

In some ways I miss the regular reinforcement obtained by the reminders that I've written on items in a category previously in the past.  This blog has a "garlic mustard" tag, which signals that I should write about that at least once a year; without that reminder, somehow I might miss that opportunity to refresh that annual recipe opportunity.   The category list is long, but finite, and it's idiosyncratic to reflect some peculiar sense of evolved focus.

Tags are much harder, especially in a world of tags shared across a team.  There are enough variant spellings and punctuation in an 8000 unit tag cloud to make it tough to see which of those tags are most useful.  Perhaps I can carve out 20 or 30 to make my own, items to revisit repeatedly, but the system as a system does not constrain me as such.

It's very useful to have a bucket that can be usefully refilled periodically.  At the cycle of once per year, the cumulative knowledge of paczki rituals or cudighi recipes makes each successive year easier.  Monthly rituals leave room to breathe between attempts, and weekly cycles build up a substantial body of work in just a year.  

In many ways this is the mindless mindfulness approach to sustained productivity; don't decide what of 1000s of things you might do, simply have one picked for you and then go at it with a strict deadline to get you to where you need to go until the next time.  The effort can be impromptu and doesn't require much explicit preparation, since you've primed the pump with previous work.  

working on metadata - stopped in your tracks and watched until you get it right

Michael Sippey writes about Ben Hammersley writing about metadata.

The quote he pulls is

So why do everything you can to keep metadata intact? Because it’s from this information that new products can be automatically created, at a scale and rapidity that would be impossible otherwise. With every piece of metadata that you don’t throw away, you gain a factor more potential ways of slicing through your content and delivering it as a separate product, simply as a result of a database lookup.

Let me give a worked-out example of this, for starters. AnnArbor.com uses Movable Type as a publishing platform; as a part of that, we have tags for each story.  A staff of journalists tagging their stories creates a lot of tags (because you are writing about a lot of things) and a few tags with a lot of stories (because you are writing a lot of stories about those things).

Keeping a collaboratively maintained set of tags sane is work (in the same way that moderating comments is work; but that's another post).  When you are writing on a deadline, you don't have the luxury to work out every last possible reuse of your work, and so you don't tag aggressively.  When you are copy editing, you might well have a reason to use or prefer a specific tag, in part because it lets you direct readers to previous coverage on the topic in a way that's much simpler than specifically deep linking to each page.

What helps me keep some part of some of the metadata I care about within the AnnArbor.com world sane is to build links to the stories that I want to refer to from an outside source - in this case Arborwiki - and as I'm doing updates to that site use it as a sanity spot-check for coverage.  Some wiki templates help speed the process of explicit linking, and an internal category helps me figure out what fragment of the tag space I've covered.  When I see a story that isn't easy to link to from a relevant page, I go back and add the tag - not because it's useful in the abstract, but because it's relevant to one specific external instance.

In this way I think that Ben is missing one of the elements of metadata, the element that says that you never really stop working on it, and that simple repurpose through a database lookup only works when you are still actively editing the database. There's nothing worse that going to a lot of work doing an attractively formatted page that's driven by a database query against a database that you can't control, and having to answer the question why a certain piece of unwanted data is there and having someone stop you in your chair and watch over your keyboard until it's gone.

Metadata only works when you un-meta it and deal with it again as data.  The list of metadata elements that I care enough to keep updating is not just meta; it's a first class real list, one that has to be treated as a first class citizen and not just some accidental system artifact.  Sometimes the metadata you expose just makes it clear how incomplete your first pass at storytelling was and what it takes to bring it back to the level of refinement that you expect.

(tags: stopped watched; so meta it hurts; arborwiki)

Distraction, scatter, gather, focus, discardia: a five part cycle

Herein a recipe for producing what looks like some kind of careful long term reasonable insight into a question, but what is really a coping strategy for the complete inability to be attentive to anything for very long.

Be distracted away from the thing you are supposed to be doing; that part is pretty easy.  Wander off randomly into the wilderness of recent changes to the Internet or a random page in your personal knowledge management heap or some long-dusty book in Google Books.  Note some small fragment of something that isn't at all relevant to what everyone else seems to be looking at right now but that somehow temporarily holds your interest long enough to compose a few paragraphs with a few links.  Write about it here; try with desperation to find a category it should already belong to so that it has some illusion of continuity with what you have been doing all along.  Hit "save", hit "publish", and return to the task at hand.

Scatter your attention all over the Internet to a range of places where recent changes seem to be more predominant.  Post to Twitter, or Facebook, or your favorite online newspaper's best reader comments section, or to some seasonally or topically appropriate blog where you know that the author welcomes your readership.  Be outwardly visible and pay attention to someone else, something else, some place other than yourself.  Make the rounds of the usual places and hit a few new ones.  Stop before everyone is asleep.

Gather up things you have written on a topic, things captured during previous distractions or scattered to the four winds.  If there is a search engine, search for your own long-forgotten commentary on something, and collect it back to somewhere central.  If all you have is paper, leaf through it steadily and methodically until inevitably that journal yields a relevant fragment.   Pile up the fragments, enumerate them, list them out carefully as though they were bits of papyrus needing careful reassembly.  See what you might have known in the past and re-know it, relearn it.

Then, when all of the distract-scatter-gather process has all been put into motion, can you focus on that one thing you have been getting ready to do all this time.  Come back to what you have gathered up and re-assess the work as a whole.  Allow yourself to work methodically through the work you have gathered together, to pull it apart, to see what the whole set looks like and not just little bits of it.   Pull through everything that is relevant and stitch it all together into something new, something that lasts longer than a simple short distraction but that hold and sustain a concentrated narrative with examples and ideas and themes and notions pulled out from a long time.

The whole process should run on some cycle appropriate for the task or the season.  As I write, I think about the quarterly holiday of Discardia, where you celebrate letting go, and of all of the distracted and scattered thinking I have about that event that culminates in an every three months deliberate effort to tidy things up.  The collected effort of pulling things together means not only that you have everything in mind but also that you can free yourself of the distractions that eventually got you here - and that you get, periodically, a chance to edit out some randomness and make it look like you are more organized and orderly than your easily-distracted nature would allow.

This season's Discardia holiday is coming up on June 20-22, 2009.

Radial categorization and the trouble with tags

I'm writing this post, and I don't have a good category to put it in, so I have to create a category for it; but the process of creating the category describes some other set of things that could belong to it, and then by the time I am done with figuring out where it belongs inside my word-hoard posted to this blog I can go back and retroactively cross-post a half dozen other prototypical posts to that category so it looks like I've been thinking about it all along.

Authors to cite, preferably from my bookshelf, so that I can show a stack of books:

Lakoff, "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things"
"Sorting Things Out: Categorization and its Consequences"
something by Ranganathan that I don't have close at hand
Tony Buzan on mind mapping
Gould and White's "Mental Maps"
"Your Creative Power"
and something from Steven Winter on categories and the law.

Scheduled to post a week from today so that it has time to cook.