I’ve been anxious to put together a website for sometime now, but I was stumped by the design of it. I wanted to put my work into neat categories- paintings, videos, design etc. and subcategories- digital life, blocks etc. but some videos were of paintings, and works about blocks were done in both painting and photography. The tidy buckets I’d hoped to build were broken even before I’d made them. In frustration I went to my friend Jon Sorenson, a genius Computer Science professor at Butler University, and within ten minutes he’d solved my problem. He immediately advised me to use a category system whereby items could easily reside in more than one category. This multivalent approach really helped to break the narrower view I was trying to impose on the work. The suggestion I most valued was where he pointed out that for future work, I shouldn’t have to worry about which category the work would fall in. Under the approach he suggested the new work could find its own categories organically and without predetermination.
This conversation jogged something in my memory, I remembered David Weinberger’s book, “Everything is Miscellaneous” and I read it immediately. I loved it, and his discussion of tagging led to the tag cloud on the landing page of this site, and the tag collection in the sidebar. I love his discussion of the three orders of order, and have been fascinated by his ideas. I’m intrigued to think of the impact category-atomization might have on academia.
Anyway, that’s the story of how the current organization scheme of this website came into being. It will be interesting to see how long this system works for this site.
