Immersed in Structure: The Meaning and Function of Taxonomies
Katherine C. Adams, kadams@mohomine.com
Mohomine
Taxonomies are an increasingly popular method of organizing information in a digital environment. Adding hand-crafted directories to the search process is one of the most important trends among consumer portals in 2000.1 Yet debate rages over the implications of deploying hierarchies, taxonomies and other rigid structures of organization.2 Some information architects argue that taxonomies limit the open, creative process of finding information. They fear that highly rational organizational and design structures stomp out emotional responses to Web sites. In this view, strictly logical Web sites illicit strictly logical end-user experiences.
This split between information architects mirrors the divide between graphic designers and usability experts. There is a long-standing debate within Web development circles that pits Jakob Nielsen's plain-wrap Web pages against Kioken's winking-blinking extravaganzas. Nielsen defines the Web as a medium for delivering information and a place to perform tasks. Kioken defines the Web as a multimedia platform that delivers excitement and entertainment.
Instead of asserting that the Web is big enough to accommodate both models (the logical, usability model vs. the emotional, web designer model),3 I want to argue that the rational organization of information on Web sites leads to serendipitous and associative thought. To put it another way, the dynamic, interactive process of seeking information is supported by structures of organization. The usability model that embraces rational, disciplined organization of information and the web designer model are really two parts of a single whole rather than a dichotomous pair. Finding information with the aid of coherently organized taxonomies and distinct navigation bars can be an immersive, transforming experience.
Hierarchies and most other structure of organization do not foreclose the iterative process of information-seeking, but help guide end-users through the back-and-forth procedure of looking for new information. Taxonomies illustrate the conceptual relationships among concepts and they function like road maps to information. Finally, since meaning is established contextually with taxonomies, they mitigate against the complexities of language and representation in the information retrieval process.
What are Taxonomies and How Do They Work?
Taxonomies are an important part of the contemporary knowledge management and search services scene. In the simplest terms, taxonomies (also called thesauri or directories) order and give meaning to the relationships among things or ideas. They arrange the world according to specific criteria. For instance, one could categorize "lipstick," "fire engine" or "grass" in a taxonomy by the different characteristics that compose each item. Arranging the terms according to color might result in "lipstick" and "fire engine" being grouped together because they are (often) both red. Ordering objects by texture might lead to a group that consists of "lipstick" and "grass" since they are both soft. Taxonomies define a world-view because they specify which characteristics that compose each item count as important and then they lay out the relationships that exist between those characteristics. Taxonomies are political, value-laden instruments of organization that have a wide-array of assumptions embedded within them.
Along more formal lines, a taxonomy is a structured vocabulary that identifies a single key term to represent a concept that could be described using several words.4 While Roget's Thesaurus guides users from one key term to multiple synonymous terms,5 online taxonomies work in the opposite direction: they help end-users locate documents about a single concept that can be described using various terms. In addition to helping end-users deal with synonyms, they also illustrate associative and hierarchical relationships among concepts. Taking an example from the AAT (Art and Architecture Thesaurus), "Pop Art" is the preferred term that describes the mid- 20th century Anglo-American art movement. "Commodity Art," "Gag Art" or "OK Art" are listed as synonyms. "Pop Art" is also associated with the concept "Neo-Dada." Furthermore, all these terms are found within the "Styles and Periods" hierarchy. Illustrating these kinds of conceptual relationships are one of the most important functions of hierarchies.
Taxonomies provide a meaningful context for retrieved information because they delineate conceptual relationships.6 This takes the pressure off the end-user. Searchers can hop from one associated concept to another (from "Pop Art" to "Neo-Dada"), learn about synonymous relationships among terms ("Gag Art" is another word for "Pop Art") or begin their search at a broader term in the hierarchy and move down to more specific instances of a concept (begin at the top of the "Styles and Periods" hierarchy and browse down to "Pop Art.")
Taxonomies Support the Iterative Process of Finding New Information
There's a distinction between retrieving a piece of information that you know exists and searching for new information. The latter, called "known-item" searching by librarians, is best executed by search engines. It is easier to enter a key word into a search engine than it is to click through several levels of a hierarchy. While search engines retrieve discrete bits of information effectively, taxonomies encourage casual browsing.
Searching for new information is dynamic, interactive and iterative. Users make a first attempt to learn something, refine their query, search for more information, refine their search and so on. It is often difficult to articulate a gap in understanding or knowledge.7 Hierarchies help users locate information when they are not able to fully articulate what it is they want. Topic-specific taxonomies facilitate associate thought because they chart the synonymous, hierarchical and associative relationships that exist within and between concepts. Searching by its very nature is not a binary enterprise. Not all organizational structures accommodate the iterative task of locating information. For example, the Ask Jeeves portal, with a natural language Q&A structure, frames searching as a binary exercise. It requires end-users to drill down a series of questions and hence backs them into a "yes" or "no" response.
Language and Searching
Taxonomies are necessary due to the complexity inherent in language and information retrieval. They are important tools in helping end-users overcome the ambiguities of language when retrieving information. Most people insert keywords into a search engine, cross their fingers and click the "Go" button. Keyword searching assumes that individual terms line up with concepts. But language is inherently ambiguous, so keyword searching often increases end-user frustration. The problem of information retrieval via keywords centers around two issues: synonymy and homonymy. Keyword searches for "dealer" will not retrieve documents that only use the synonymous "trader," but they will retrieve homonymous but irrelevant sites concerning, for example, "wheeler dealer."8 Keyword searching is inherently and deeply flawed. Furthermore, when rhetoric assumes the mantle of style, fancy or ornamentation, keyword searching falters. That is, when the content of a text is rhetorical flourish or play itself, keyword searching fails. Relying on keywords or any sort of linguistic computation generally yields very poor relevancy in search results.
Furthermore, information retrieval and organization based on keyword searching begins from the assumption that content is transparently present in a text. But that's not how language works. Language cannot fully represent, or accurately point to, an external reality. Language, cultural theorists hold, constructs reality through a play of differences and in a specific context.9 One reason that keyword searching is so inadequate is that it's built on a model of language and representation that has rightly been discarded as inaccurate.10 In other words, content-bearing words (i.e., keywords) do not carry content unproblematically.11 Information retrieval and organization are processes of communication and, thus, depend on context.
Taxonomies mitigate against the complexities of representation in information retrieval. They contextualize the search and knowledge management process. Because directories explicitly delineate a structure of conceptual relationships, the meaning of a discrete term is not presented as "a thing in itself" but is understood in the context of surrounding terms. Furthermore, directories are constructed, ideally, to suit the needs of a particular end-user population within a specific cultural and institutional context. Directories, since they are tailored to individual user groups, reflect and further create widely-held patterns of language and thought Therefore, they clearly articulate a specific point of view instead of seeming to act as mirrors of a pre-existent reality.
Taxonomies Facilitate Associative Learning and a New Model of Thought
It is no small irony that taxonomies, rigid organizational structures, facilitate the mental zigzag of leaping from idea to idea. Taxonomies, hierarchies, etc. encourage creativity because they provide a structure end-users may react to and play against. Serendipitous associations are hard to come by within a mass of confusing signs and conflicting symbols. Organizational and navigational structures set the end-user free because within those confines a world of synonymous, associative and hierarchical possibilities yawns wide.
Marjorie Garber, a popular English professor at Harvard, argues that jumping from association to association is becoming the paradigmatic mode of discourse.12 In Symptoms of Culture Garber connects ideas by cultural, historic and linguistic association. For instance, she knits together high and low culture by comparing Field of Dreams (a baseball movie in which one achieves greatness by hitting a homer) and Homer (the Iliad and the Odyssey are about Odysseus' journey and eventual return home). Garber's witty cultural criticism is based on just this type of accidental pun: the link between homer and Homer is associative and linguistic rather than "real."13 Some commentators have hailed Garbor's method as a fundamental shift in our way of understanding the world.14 In Garber's analysis isolated bits of culture (such as movies, books, items of material culture, etc.) are without meaning until they are contextualized by cultural, historic and linguistic associations. Cultural meaning occurs for Garber as an endless stream of contextualization and recontextualization. One way this process occurs is through associative thought. Thesauri facilitate associative thought. Therefore, taxonomies are one means by which cultural meanings are formed and reworked.
Organizational structures within Web sites encourage emotional, fortuitous information-seeking behavior. Directories are value-laden tools of information organization that articulate a specific world-view. Because taxonomies lay out synonymous, associative and hierarchical relationships, they function like guides to information. They support the dynamic process of finding information and facilitate associative thought.
References- Paul Festa, "Web Results Still Have Human Touch," CNET, 27 December 1999 [journal on-line] available from www.cnet.com.
- Peter Morville, "Defining Information Architecture," Argus Center for Information Architecture July 10, 2000. [Web site] available from http://argus-acia.com/strange_connections/strange001.html.
- Curt Cloninger, "Usability Experts are From Mars, Graphic Designers are From Venus, A List Apart, 28 July, 2000 [on-line journal] available from http://www.alistapart.com/stories/marsvenus/.
- "Information About the Getty Vocabularies" [Web site] available from http://www.getty.edu/gri/vocabularies/using.htm.
- Peter Morville, "Building a Synonymous Search Index," Web Review Oct. 8, 1998 [on-line journal] available from http://webreview.com/wr/pub/98/10/30/feature/index.html.
- David Batty, "WWW-Wealth, Weariness or Waste," D-Lib November 1998 [on-line journal] available from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november98/11batty.html.
- Bates, Marcia J. "The Design of Browsing and Berrypicking Techniques for the Online Search Interface." Online Review 13 (October 1989): 407-424
- Dianne L. Juby, "Rhetoric in the Age of the World Wide Web" [article on-line] available from http://www.ou.edu/cas/english/agora/dianne.html.
- Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, New York: Oxford University Press, 1984; Jonathan D. Culler On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.
- Stuart Hall, "The Spectacle of the Other," in Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practice, ed. Stuart Hall. 223-290. London: Open University, 1997.
- David C. Blair, Language and Representation in Information Retrieval, Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers, 1990; .David C. Blair, "Will it Scale Up? Thoughts About Intellectual Access in the Electronic Networks," American Library Association [Web site] available from http://www.ala.org/symp3/blair.html.
- Marjorie Garber, Symptoms of Culture, New York: Rutledge, 1998.
- Scott Stossel, "
Symptoms of the Culture Wars," book review of Marjorie Garber's Symptoms of Culture. The Atlantic, Sept. 2, 2000 [on-line journal] available at http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/graffiti/ag9809.htm. - Ibid.
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