A miscellaneous web site design

This week, in fact, by the end of today, we’re putting together a design for a web site.

I will use a hierarchical structure, because this is what we most often encounter, and it would be useful to structure such a site as a learning exercise.

However, in terms of the way we could organize and access information, I am much more interested in the approach and described in David Weinberger’s book, Everything is Miscellaneous.  The idea behind this book is that technology now allows us to structure information in an unstructured way. Since that sounds contradictory, I will try to explain. The book uses the analogy of a library, where the books are placed in a certain order, using a structure such as the Library of Congress Classification System or the Dewey Decimal System. In the case of a physical object like a book, we don’t have much choice.  It needs to have a physical location if we’re going to be able to find a later.

With electronic data, we don’t have to assign a particular place to each object. However, we still need a way to access, retrieve, or find it. And our criteria for finding the object may be different from the next person’s. Technology makes this ability to retrieve a piece of information according to the users’ way of viewing it possible. We can do this by tagging the objects using metadata.  So, for instance a web page that lists information on visiting Rome could be tagged with a number of tags: Italy, Classical architecture, Roman Catholicism, Michelangelo, the Vatican, the Spanish steps, etc. A search engine on that site would retrieve the page if any of those search tags were chosen by the user.

The organizational structure described in our Chapter three reading that comes closest to this approach is the database structure (p.10). However the third bullet in the database description talks about the importance of a flowchart which would show how the information is organized and connected. In a miscellaneous structure, there would not necessarily be connections between the items. Some of them might share the same tag, of course, but there would not have to be links between them from an organizational perspective.  Maybe the last bullet in that list, which has no words besides it, represents this concept.

I don’t think you could design a web site that used only this structure, unless it was just a search engine site. But it would be an interesting alternative on a site, as a way to accommodate users’ differing associations with the same information.

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