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Peter Morville is president and founder of Semantic Studios, an information architecture, user experience, and findability consultancy.  He is widely recognized as a founder of the information architecture field, and he serves as an advocate for the roles that search and findability play in defining the user experience.

Books:

• Search Patterns (January 2010), co-authored with Jeffery Callender
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (2006), co-authored with Louis Rosenfeld
• Ambient Findability (2005)
• The Internet Searcher’s Handbook: Locating Information, People, & Software (1999), co-authored by Louis Rosenfeld, Joseph Janes, Graceanne Decandido

As chief executive officer of Argus Associates (1994-2001), Morville helped build one of the world’s most respected information architecture firms, serving clients such as AT&T, Barron’s, HP, IBM, L.L.Bean, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Vanguard and the Weather Channel.

He is a founder and past president of the IA Institute (Information Architecture) and has served on the ASIS&T (American Society for Information Science and Technology) board of directors.  He now serves on the Advisory Boards of Global Findability, Rosenfeld Media, the new Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, Clueray, and Project Information Literacy.

Morville holds a degree in library and information science from the University of Michigan’s School of Information, where he has also served on the faculty.  His work has been featured in Business Week, CIO Insight, The Economist, Fortune, MSNBC, NPR, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

Morville blogs at findability.org, where he discusses findability, marketing, design, and a number of other topics including his latest marathon run.  He can be reached via email (morville@semanticstudios.com), Twitter @morville, LinkedIn @morville, and Flickr @morville.

From Flickr, here’s a photo of him at an IA Summit (at left) and an illustration that he co-designed with Jeffery Callendar “while listening to Pink Floyd” called Tear Down the Wall (at right).  He regularly responds to user comments/questions regarding his images, so check them out and let him know what you think.  His favorite image by other Flickr members?  Books Ready for Raffling (I wonder why…insert sarcasm here).

Check out this awesome interview response he gave in which he references Clay Shirky!

B&A: In a recent article about authority, you point out that Tim O’Reilly proclaimed the death of taxonomy. Do you agree with him?

Morville: No. Unfortunately, Tim is suffering from apophenia. I think he caught it from Clay Shirky. I hope they both get well soon.

Want to see Morville in action?  Peter Morville presentation on YouTube.

Chapter 1: Lost and Found

“The whole world is accessible and addressable through this 21^st Century looking glass in the palm of my hands” (p. 1).

Morville describes today’s technological devices, like his Treo 600, as two-way mirrors from which we can find information and connect with others and they can find and connect with us.  He details several new interfaces and devices such as Ambient Orb, Delicious Library, RFID microchip implant, and so on (of particular creepiness is the Wherify Wireless watch with GPS to track your child’s every move – if you own this product, my apologies).

Morville argues that with these new devices, we’ll have more information and, therefore, more possibilities but we’ll struggle to balance privacy, freedom, convenience and safety.

The uses for mobile devices continue to increase.  “We increasingly use mobile devices to find our way, to find products, to find answers, and to find ourselves” (p. 3).

So what is findability?  His definition:

1. the quality of being locatable or navigable
2. the degree to which a particular object is easy to discover or locate
3. the degree to which a system or environment supports navigation and retrieval

When the web has findability, individuals are empowered with information and choice. One of his examples is of how people have more access to medical information because of the web and can therefore make informed decisions regarding their health.  Do you think most people are making more informed health decisions or pressuring their doctors to prescribe unnecessary drugs?  Check out these two funny drug commercial parodies: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLR2OKesTw0 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcz4TcSZ9r0.

How does he define ambient?  Glad you asked.  Ambient:

1. surrounding, encircling
2. completely enveloping

Ambient findability, therefore, is a world where we can find anything or anyone at anytime from anywhere.  According to Morville, we’re not there yet but getting closer.

Why should we care about findability?

• Children and Media: TV viewership among children is high but literacy is also high (because we can’t function without literacy), so he’s not really concerned about that.  But today’s children must know how to search for information and who to trust.  (Interesting article here on a new tool that flags questionable Wikipedia information.)
• Business: We need to ask ourselves how we can make our websites easier to navigate and easier to find in the first place.  The more information that’s out there, the harder it is to reach customers and convince them to buy (you can’t buy what you can’t find).

He then compares the Internet to a lost and found area.  “People from all over can now report and seek items using the Internet Lost and Found” (p. 14).  This reminded me of the following AT&T commercial.

He concludes by saying that technology is great but not a miracle worker: “Technology remains subject to the laws of physics and the gravity of economics” (p. 14).  But he’s an optimist; he believes technology helps people overall and is not robbing us of culture.

Chapter 3: Information Interaction

He begins by describing Moore’s Law (faster is better, more is more) and Mooer’s Law (less is more; people may not want information because “having information is painful and troublesome” (p. 44) – you have to learn it and then understand it).  We are creating half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress each year, so obviously we’re following Moore’s Law.  But Moore’s law “doesn’t apply to the human brain” (p. 45).  Morville believes we need to focus less on the wealth of information and more on the “poverty of attention” (p. 45).  We need to make information easy to find and understand.  We must not assume that users want our information, even if they need it.

Defining Information

What is information?  Morville gives a circular definition: “data is information is knowledge is information is data” (p. 45) and compares it to the circular images by M.C. Escher (I think Escher’s Humanity [at right] corresponds nicely as well). 

Information is difficult to define and many definitions simply lead to more questions.  The key to this mystery?  Communication: “information is about communication” (p. 46).  It allows us to communicate across time and space.

Information Retrieval

New technologies complicate matters: we’ve gone from oral storytelling, to the written word, to digital documents, and back again.  It also changes the nature of a document.  Morville states that “the Web has confused our notions of genre” (p. 48).

Challenges faced during the time of punch cards still exist today because they arise from the nature of language and meaning.  What is our main challenge in information retrieval?  Relevance: 1) precision – how well does a system retrieve only the relevant information and 2) recall – how well does it retrieve all the relevant information (recall decreases as collection size increases).

Language and Representation

Information retrieval is built on words, but words are imprecise, vague, etc.  Power laws and the 80/20 rule come into play with language (connection to Shirky’s “Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality”).  Power laws occur as a result of unification and diversification (in retrieval this equals description and discrimination).  There’s no way for software to determine aboutness, but humans can apply metadata tags to indicate aboutness making retrieval more precise.  “Computers aren’t even close to extracting or understanding or visually representing meaning” (p. 54).

The People Problem (You can find funny IT stories on the People Problem here.)

First problem: relevance is subjective.

People will not seek information that will make their jobs harder.  Morville calls this fast food information consumption: we’ll sacrifice quality for convenience. People are also applying human characteristics to technology (references Norman’s Emotional Design which I have – I read it for Writing in Electronic Environments).  In other words, rationality doesn’t always win out with humans.

Information Interaction

Gershon’s definition: how human beings interact with, relate to, and process information regardless of the medium connecting the two” (p. 58).

“The Web allows our information seeking to grow more iterative and interactive with each innovation” (p. 60) = Bates’ idea of “berrypicking.”

Morville closes with these questions: Will the information environments of tomorrow be less troublesome than those of today?  Is more really more?  How will humans respond to such a wealth of information?

This was my first time using LinkedIn (apparently I’m quite a newbie when it comes to social media).  I found that it was not very easy to use, especially adding contacts.  You have to know your contacts’ email addresses and input them manually.  You can look up classmates through a list of ODU students but it is extremely long and cumbersome to search through.  Unfortunately, I can’t import contacts via my email account because LinkedIn doesn’t recognize ODU gmail accounts (or at least it didn’t recognize mine).

The goal of LinkedIn is to provide a site where users can post information on their education, knowledge in their fields, and career experience, and network with other professionals.  The site’s networking ability provides users with the opportunity to share ideas and/or practices relating to their field, build relationships with other professionals , and search for jobs.

I think this site is helpful, especially to those currently looking for a new position in their field, but also to those not looking to change jobs.  Networking through LinkedIn may prove essential in a future job search.  This site also seems very helpful to contractors or freelance workers who would be able to access to their clients’ contacts, providing potential client information.

I am interested in discovering how many people in my field are on LinkedIn.  Since I work in public relations, I’m assuming the number will be quite high (marketing professionals love to market themselves after all).

I’ve never used academia.edu so this was a new experience for me.  It was very easy to find my department and build a page (although I spent entirely too much time searching for the right photo to use of myself).  I like how I can find others who share my research interests and check out books they’ve read, papers they’ve written, etc.  I also like that I can get to know other ODU grad students via their profiles.  This feature would have helped me connect with other students when I first entered the grad program at ODU (something that I’ve struggled with).  I can envision this site as an online community for ODU’s English grad students — a place they can connect, discuss research, share ideas, seek support, and so on.

The goal of academia.edu is to help academics connect with others who share their interests and keep track of developments in their fields of interest.  This seems effective in regards to those who are are members of academia.edu.  In other words, the people and papers that I have access to are members and the papers they post.

Since I’m not incredibly familiar with the site, I’m not sure if there is much direct communication occurring on academia.edu.  The “what are you thinking about right now?” question is confusing to me.  Is this site supposed to function as a type of Facebook page (with updates and musings) but with an academic bent?  Looking at the comment frequency of most of the profiles, it does not seem to demand daily or even monthly updates.  I think the site could improve upon the ability for members to comment on one another’s posts (and encourage members’ posts – maybe through a link to Twitter).  It would also be interesting if the site created some areas where those with similar interests could have discussions.

Baym – The new shape of online community: The example of Swedish independent music fandom (2007)

In this article Baym argues that online groups have not been replaced by egocentric networks (such as MySpace, Facebook, and so on), but have taken a new form, spread out among various websites.  Her research is based on over 2 years of participant-observation of the online fan community of independent rock music from Sweden.

Her study of Swedish indie music found that since it receives little radio airplay, fans rely on the Internet to locate new music and connect with one another.  These connections, however, do not take place in one all-purpose website.

She details several websites, including It’s A Trap, which features MP3s, news items, discussion forums, and the ability for fans to leave comments, create profiles, and send and receive private messages.  However, she found that fans did not limit their community building to IAT; they also connected viaMySpace, Virb, and Last.fm .  The majority of the fans read one or more sites without registering or leaving messages.  Those who participated online did so by leaving comments, linking profiles to social networking sites, or uploading YouTube videos.

She argues that social networking sites “support fan community by providing launching pads for individuals to contact one another” and by facilitating the creation of groups.  But she also questions the consequences of social coherence if groups are spread through multiple sites and identifies problems such as coherence, efficiency, and coordination.

Baym calls for more research on the connections among online platforms, since most studies focus on particular online spaces such as blogs, newsgroups, social networking sites, etc.  This type of research does not accurately reflect the online life of most people.

Questions:

How do online users’ identities change among different online groups?

Considering the fact that online users spread themselves out over a variety of websites, how can organizations reach their audience effectively?

If you are involved in online groups, does your online activity reinforce Baym’s claims?

Nancy Baym

Nancy Baym is an associate professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas.  She’s been writing and teaching about social media and the internet for more than 15 years.  She’s written many articles and a few books about online community, fandom, and online communication.

A list of her work, and other interesting information, can be found on her website.

She co-founded and served as president of The Association of Internet Researchers and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, the Information Society, and New Media & Society, as well as The Journal of Communication, Research on Language and Social Interaction, and Sociology Compass.

She’s appeared in the media quite frequently, whether being quoted, interviewed, and included on panels.  Wired magazine offered her advice, along with Brad Pitt’s, in its August 2009 edition.  Here is a link to an MP3 file of a discussion on text messaging and social networking sites on KCUR, Kansas City radio station (note: file will not open in Quicktime, but will play in other media players).  Here’s a podcast on socializing online which can be downloaded to iTunes.

She also writes music reviews for and reads It’s A Trap, a Scandinavian music journal, daily (writes about IAT in her article “The new shape of online community”).

Her blog, Online Fandom, offers news and perspectives on fan communication and online social life.

She’s on Twitter, of course.

Also check out the comic strip she wrote.

Finding the Quality in Qualitative Internet Research (2006)

According to Baym, qualitative research is plagued by problems, most of which are intensified in Internet research.  Unlike quantitative research and its clear-cut rules (“N of 8 is not adequate for making general claims”), qualitative research has no clear-cut rules to determine its legitimacy.  Some believe that qualitative research is subjective and therefore is always accurate, while others believe it is too “impressionistic” to have scientific value.

Problems specific to Internet research include the failure of researchers to consider existing literature and difficulty in finding research due to the field’s lack of institutionally recognized disciplinary status or premier journals.

Baym examines several examples of good qualitative research and presents a set of principles for quality in qualitative research.  Strong qualitative research:

1. Is grounded in theory and data: how – old theories used and built upon; why – allows the scholar to show how the work tells us something we didn’t know before
2. Demonstrates rigor in data collection and analysis: how – present data from a range of areas and situations; why – you can’t make claims about what is frequent, rare, important, etc. if you don’t spend considerable time in the environment you’re studying
3. Uses multiple strategies: how – triangulation; why – 2 or more routes to the phenomenon provides more insight
4. Takes into account perspective of participants: how – talk to participants; why – we need to understand why participants do the way they do
5. Demonstrates awareness of and self-reflectivity regarding process: how – be aware of how you influence data and interpretation; why – researcher may need to adjust initial questions
6. Considers interconnections between the internet and the world within: how – examine how offline situations influence online situations and vice versa; why – cyberspace and the offline world cannot be separated into two separate worlds, independent of one another

Questions:

How does research we have examined in class stand up to Baym’s set of principles?

Examining your own work, are there any areas you would improve upon based on Baym’s principles?

This is my first time using Twitter.  At first, it was very intimidating, figuring out how to follow others and reply directly to them.  Then there was the 140 character limit. How do I say something brilliant in 140 characters?  It definitely is an exercise in brevity.  I’m also working on getting the vocabulary down.  I slip up every now and then and say “I twittered today.”  I’m working on saying “tweet” without feeling ridiculous.

My main concern, however, has been posting statements that won’t affect my career in a negative way.  Lately, I’ve read a lot of articles about people who have lost their jobs due to blog responses or tweets that were critical of their companies (here’s an interesting one: http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/worklife/08/24/cb.job.social.medial.pitfalls/index.html?iref=newssearch).  Of course, some of these incidents could be prevented if people used common sense (posting “my boss is an idiot” on your facebook page, especially when your boss is one of your Facebook friends, is not a good idea).  But it makes one worry about what is acceptable.  Can I relate work-related experiences to my studies?  Can I provide constructive criticism without being reprimanded in the workplace?  Is discussing corporate issues considered releasing sensitive or protected information?  Will these blog responses and tweets come back to haunt me one day?

Some people feel that they can get away with anything on the web because…well, who’s checking?  In the past, few workplaces were on Facebook or Twitter.  Social software was considered for personal use only.  But as more workplaces begin delving into social media, employees are having to be more cautious about what they post.  It seems that the corporate world can no longer deny the importance of social media – now that it’s proven its worth.  This reminds me of Silver and Massanari’s statement regarding the slow implementation of technology in higher education.  They claimed that technology had to “prove its value” (p. xi) to gain acceptance.  I’ve definitely seen that in the workplace.  Now that it’s been shown that certain technologies are effective and will be around for a while, the corporate world is ready to jump in.

And a new semester begins…