Information & Information Architecture

This book celebrates escapes from flatland, rendering several hundred superb displays of complex data. Revealed here are design strategies for enhancing the dimensionality and density of portrayals of information—techniques exemplified in maps, the manuscripts of Galileo, timetables, notation describing dance movements, aerial photographs, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, electrocardiograms, drawings of Calder and Klee, computer visualizations, and a textbook of Euclid's geometry.

Our investigation yields general principles that have specific visual consequences, governing the design, editing, analysis, and critique of data representations. These principles help to identify and to explain design excellence—why some displays are better than others.

Different they may seem, search, tags, folders, hyperlinks, and algorithmic recommendations are all really interface ideas trying to address the same fundamental problem: looking for the needle in an information haystack.

...When designing an interface for finding a note in a small pile of personal notes, or building an app to organize a small team’s working documents, most of the “finding stuff” interface ideas are in play. It’s in these situations where I want to make the argument: prefer interfaces that let the user incrementally move towards the right answer over direct search.

Humans are much better at choosing between a few options than conjuring an answer from scratch. We’re also much better at incrementally approaching the right answer by pointing towards the right direction than nailing the right search term from the beginning. When it’s possible to take a “type in a query” kind of interface and make it more incrementally explorable, I think it’s almost always going to produce a more intuitive and powerful interface.

Information displays should be annotated, combining words, images, graphics, whatever it takes to describe and explain something. Annotation calls out and explains information and, at the same time, explains to viewers how to read data displays. Good annotation is like a knowledgeable expert/teacher at the viewer's side pointing and saying, "Now see how this works with that, how this might explain that..."

There are many visual design guidelines but the basic principle might be summarized as the Visual Information Seeking Mantra:

Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand

Each line represents one project in which I found myself rediscovering this principle and therefore wrote it down it as a reminder. It proved to be only a starting point in trying to characterize the multiple information visualization innovations occurring at university, government, and industry research labs.

Interfaces are becoming less dense.

...[Density is] It’s not just the way an interface looks at one moment in time; it’s about the amount of information an interface can provide over a series of moments. It’s about how those moments are connected through design design decisions, and how those decisions are connected to the value the software provides.

...UI density is the value a user gets from the interface divided by the time and space the interface occupies.

In this paper we describe an ontology developed for a cyber security knowledge graph database. This is intended to provide an organized schema that incorporates information from a large variety of structured and unstructured data sources, and includes all relevant concepts within the domain. We compare the resulting ontology with previous efforts, discuss its strengths and limitations, and describe areas for future work.

13pt is the work of Jonathan Corum, an information designer and science graphics editor at The New York Times.

Preparing to write the novel Catch 22, Joseph Heller composed a storyboard, a 2-dimensional list with 3,650 words arrayed in 34 × 21 = 714 interacting cells. Rows are ordered in time, and each row records when each character does what. Some cell entries are erased. It took 7 years to complete the novel's 758-page typescript.

The Catch 22 plotchart works better upon replacing optically noisy grids with ghost grids. Lightness of framing lines creates soft boundaries to maintain order and also allows words to spill across cells naturally...More generally, ask of information displays and interfaces, "What is the strongest visual element?" The correct answer is not "grid lines".

ImageQuilts allows you to make "quilts" from images on your computer or anywhere on the web.

A useful starting point for designing advanced graphical user interjaces is the Visual lnformation-Seeking Mantra: overview first, zoom and filter, then details on demand. But this is only a starting point in trying to understand the rich and varied set of information visualizations that have
been proposed in recent years. This paper offers a task by data type taxonomy with seven data types (one-, two-, three-dimensional datu, temporal and multi-dimensional data, and tree and network data) and seven tasks (overview, Zoom, filter, details-on-demand, relate, history, and extracts).

Recently it occurred to me that I could use fore-edge indexing as a way to track the structure of a book. I was reading a book and it was going splendidly and then all the sudden I got bogged down. I suspected it had something to do with pacing and chapter length. So I did a fore-edge index and soon I had visual evidence of my suspicion: swelling chapters broke up the flow.

const rx = /[\s,\]\[\(\)]+/g;
const counts = {};
for (const file of Deno.args)
  for (const x of (await Deno.readTextFile(file)).split(rx))
    counts[x] = 1 + counts[x] || 1;
const total = Object.values(counts).reduce((a, b) => a + b, 0);
let entropy = 0;
for (const c of Object.values(counts)) {
  const p = c / total;
  entropy -= p * Math.log2(p);
}
console.log(entropy);

I’ve always understood one reason why development-led products turn out the way they do (bad): developers get excited by making something work. That’s the payoff. Once it works, the motivation for everything else dries up.

Building Tootbox, I’ve realised another reason: developers think in data. When you’re looking at database fields and need to design a way for users to fill them, the easy way out is a form that maps inputs 1:1 with those fields. This makes for a very uninspired UI.

...I once read that almost all software is just displaying lists of items. This is true. Think about Twitter; you follow a list of users, those users have lists of tweets, and those tweets have lists of likes. It’s lists all the way down.

Developing an app that allows users to add to lists and then displaying those lists back to them isn’t hard — at least not at first. And because it’s not very hard, everything else about making the product successful gets more difficult. What’s the angle? How is it different than the next thing? Messaging, marketing, and design are key differentiators. The only real difference between Goodreads and Letterboxd is the niches they’ve chosen.

There are relatively few open literature reports that provide empirical descriptive studies of intelligence analysis and that link these into the context of expertise and work. This paper, based on first results from a cognitive task analysis and verbal protocols, gives a broad brush description of intelligence analysis as an example of sensemaking. It then suggests some possible leverage points where technology might be applied.

...The analyst's conceptual schema sometimes play a central role in the intelligence activities. Many forms of intelligence analysis are what we might call sensemaking tasks. Such tasks consist of information gathering, re-representation of the information in a schema that aids analysis, the development of insight through the manipulation of this representation, and the creation of some knowledge product or direct action based on the insight. In a formula:

Information → Schema → Insight → Product

The re-representation may be informally in the analyst's mind or aided by a paper and pencil or computer-based

• laying out information spatially seems to work well for me for divergent thinking - putting ideas next to each other, recombining them, rich media and text intermixed on the same infinite canvas
• keeping in mind Thinking by Writing ideas, canvas for thinking should probably be a very personal thing
  • all my attempts so far, to share the work in progress canvases have failed - they seem to be too close to my internal concept map for them to be useful to anyone else in the spatial form

We need to get some freedom from context so that we're not stuck repeating a single performance, without ending up so free that we have no idea what the music is supposed to sound like. This is the space where notation comes in.

There are two different vocabularies I like for thinking about this tension. One is Brian Cantwell Smith's idea of "the middle distance" in On the Origin of Objects, which I wrote about here. Useful notation is somewhere in the middle distance between the spectrogram and the cat, not rigidly causally linked and not completely unrelated either.

The other is super obscure. I got it from this paper by Gordon Bearn that I fished up from Google Scholar. Bearn talks about how representations must broach the possibility of meaning, by providing some link at all to the thing they represent (this is what the cat fails at). At the same time they must also breach their context by getting some distance from it (this is what the spectrogram fails at).

While language model (LM)-powered chatbots and generative search engines excel at answering concrete queries, discovering information in the terrain of unknown unknowns remains challenging for users. To emulate the common educational scenario where children/students learn by listening to and participating in conversations with their parents/teachers, we create Collaborative STORM (Co-STORM). Unlike QA systems that require users to ask all the questions, Co-STORM lets users observe and occasionally steer the discourse among several LM agents. The agents ask questions on the user's behalf, allowing the user to discover unknown unknowns serendipitously. To facilitate user interaction, Co-STORM assists users in tracking the discourse by organizing the uncovered information into a dynamic mind map, ultimately generating a comprehensive report as takeaways.

Benjamin Franklin wrote and published Poor Richard's Almanack annually from 1732 to 1758. Paper was expensive and printing difficult and time-consuming. The type would be inked, the sheet of paper laid on the press, the apprentices would press the sheet, by turning a big screw. Then the sheet was removed and hung up to dry. Then you can do another printing of the same page. Do this ten thousand times and you have ten thousand prints of a sheet. Do it ten thousand more to print a second sheet. Then print the second side of the first sheet ten thousand times and print the second side of the second sheet ten thousand times. Fold 20,000 sheets into eighths, cut and bind them into 10,000 thirty-two page pamphlets and you have your Almanacks.

Color carries a huge amount of information. Color draws our attention. Color distinguishes things. And we just use it to distinguish syntax.

Nothing wrong with distinguishing syntax. It's the "just" that bothers me. Highlighting syntax is not always the most important thing to us. The information we want from code depends on what we're trying to do. I'm interesting in different things if I'm writing greenfield code vs optimizing code vs debugging code vs doing a code review. I should be able to swap different highlighting rules in and out depending on what I need. I should be able to combine different rules into task-level overlays that I can toggle on and off.

I doubt many people give any thought to indices. I suspect that in the popular mind indexes are merely tools for readers. I am not so sure that many scholars think of them as more than that. This concerns me. An index is, and can be, more. Because the creation of an index often comes near the end of a project, when time and patience are scarce, scholars hurry through them. There is no obvious reward for putting much time into one. I understand this. The creation of an index, however, is an art. Indexes are an opportunity to reveal to readers the layers of a work, as well as its priorities. They help both scholars and everyday readers see your argument and the nuance around it. They may be only tools, but they are indispensable to any good nonfiction and, especially, any academic book.

Historical facts, knowledge, or thinking are not isolated atoms in a formless cloud of information, as digitalized bits; on the contrary, they form a dense network of causalities and interactions. This endless interaction and intertwining is crucial in all creative thoughts, and it makes knowledge even seemingly far from one's discipline useful in one's own work.

I wish to create a kind of forest of thought in which the reader can become happily lost. The side note references are not given to show the extensiveness of my library; my numerous quotes are only intended to leave traces that the readers may follow beyond the contents of these condensed texts.

Think of queries as a way to look at your content from a different perspective. You can use queries to find specific information within your content, save it, and reuse it elsewhere.

You can also think of queries as automated collections or pools of content. As soon as you create new content that matches the rules of a query, it will automatically be added to the query. Queries automatically organize your content for you.

In ~1560 Ettore Ausonia, a polymath with interests from mathematics to mirror-making, constructed an immense wordy diagram depicting reflections from concave spherical mirrors. Then, between 1592 and 1601, while teaching at the University of Padua, Galileo made this handwritten copy of the diagram, which was fortunate since Ausonio's original has since gone missing. Three helpful architectures for the off-the-grid sentences are deployed – word trees, stacklists, annotated linking lines.

When the Smithsons placed the water heater for the Hunstanton Secondary School prominently above the school’s roofline, they weren’t just revealing the building’s infrastructure, they were reveling in it. What does it look like to do this on the web?

Of course there’s no single answer, because the web is simultaneously a physical and digital medium. It is material and it isn’t. It depends on how literally you interpret the question. But taking it somewhere in-between, seeing the web as primarily an information medium, we can ask the question a little differently: what does it look like to design something that is true to the material of digital information?

Not all that many readers go to the back matter and look up the source for a single sentence. But the back matter can also be read as ordinary text, revealing a history of content and sources. And images and illustrations from the book in the back matter create a lovely visual/verbal summary quilt of the entire book, enjoyed by all.

Simplicity - The individual wordings in the Hillary tweet are actually fine. But why oh why would you draw that absurd diagram, which makes the message here seem vastly more complicated than it has to be? What on earth is the word “intersectional” doing in a tweet from a presidential candidate during a campaign? Intersectional is a word that should never, ever be used by Democratic candidates for office in public messaging. It sounds like the unnecessary academic jargon it is. The trouble is that so much of left-of-center messaging is directed at insiders rather than average people

People count by tens and machines count by twos—that pretty much sums up the way we do arithmetic on this planet. But there are countless other ways to count. Here I want to offer three cheers for base 3, the ternary system. The numerals in this sequence—beginning 0, 1, 2, 10, 11, 12, 20, 21, 22, 100, 101—are not as widely known or widely used as their decimal and binary cousins, but they have charms all their own. They are the Goldilocks choice among numbering systems: When base 2 is too small and base 10 is too big, base 3 is just right.

...The cultural preference for base 10 and the engineering advantages of base 2 have nothing to do with any intrinsic properties of the decimal and binary numbering systems. Base 3, on the other hand, does have a genuine mathematical distinction in its favor. By one plausible measure, it is the most efficient of all integer bases; it offers the most economical way of representing numbers.

Yahoo wasn’t a search engine, at least not in the same way that Google was. Yahoo was a directory with a search interface on top. You could find what you were looking for by typing or you could zero in on what you were looking for by drilling down through a directory structure.

...Search engines put their money on computation, or to use today’s parlance, algorithms (or if you’re really shameless, AI). Directories put their money on humans. Good ol’ information architecture.

...Directory structures still make sense to me (because I’m old) but I don’t have a problem with search. I do have a problem with systems that try to force me to search when I want to drill down into folders.

This problem of long-term digital storage seemed a crucial hurdle for any civilization trying to act generationally. How could a society think in terms of centuries unless there was a reliable way to transmit and store its knowledge over centuries? This puzzle was the focus of a conference hosted by Long Now in 01998, dedicated to technical solutions for Managing Digital Continuity. At this meeting Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive suggested a new technology developed by Los Alamos labs, and commercialized by Norsam Technologies, as a solution for long term digital storage. Norsam promised to micro-etch 350,000 pages of information onto a 3-inch nickel disk with an estimated lifespan of 2,000 -10,000 years.

Both tags and collections let you group content together. Grouping content within the same object is done with collections. Grouping content from different objects is done with tags.

Two relatively common ‘fashions’ today are real-time collaboration and shared data repositories of one kind or another.

Both increase productivity in the naive sense. We work more; everybody is more active; the group feels more cohesive.

The downside is that they also both tend to reduce the quality of the work and increase busywork.

I’ve been musing for a while now on the way blog posts are typically presented—in reverse chronological order. This format has never truly made sense and does not reflect the way good writing and thinking happens.

...The main issue with the ‘pile’ system is that this post is eventually buried beneath more recent pieces of writing; there is no incentive for revisiting or updating the work. Even worse, if an author does decide to unearth the piece and make some major changes, those who read the original piece are not made aware of these alterations. The sorting order is static.

Clay is like ChatGPT for Earth — a platform and community with a generative AI model at its core.

Over the course of 10 years of using Are.na, I have fully adopted the view that any piece of information can be important to a person given the right context. And on Are.na, pieces of information can be arranged in infinite varieties of contexts – their respective meaning shifts as the proximate information shifts. In other words, the more connections a block has, the more opportunities it has to be a nodal point.

It turns out there are no “simple” concepts. There’s a surprising amount of detail all around us.

I’d argue that this is a useful mental model for consultants working with clients. (Is the client changing? Sort of? It doesn’t really look like they’re changing): clients have a surprising amount of detail.

The report follows up Dr. Rothenberg’s 1995 article in Scientific American, “Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents” by elaborating the author’s proposal for emulating obsolete software/hardware systems on future, unknown systems, as a means of preserving digital information far into the future.

It’s popular to point out that our phones never appear in our dreams. I’ve always believed this is because our devices frame our reality so comprehensively that we imagine we live inside them, and only in dreams do we escape the physical constraints that break the illusion…In physical space, despite our best efforts, the screen always ends somewhere. And like our dreams, virtual reality also promises a screen-free reality, with the frame sufficiently expanded. But the Sphere suggests a different possibility: We love the screens themselves, so much that even within our virtual worlds we’ll still build new screens to look at.

There may be a lot of things that have to be studied, but there is also what I call "occupational therapy for the opposition" that says, send them off to do some more pushups on the internet. You need to be mindful that it is possible to use information, and the need for information, as a delay for the call for action.

TiddlyWiki is a unique non-linear notebook for capturing, organising and sharing complex information
Use it to keep your to-do list, to plan an essay or novel, or to organise your wedding. Record every thought that crosses your brain, or build a flexible and responsive website.

TiddlyWiki lets you choose where to keep your data, guaranteeing that in the decades to come you will still be able to use the notes you take today.

Boltzmann's constant reflects a historical misunderstanding of the concept of entropy, whose informational nature is obfuscated when expressed in J/K. We suggest that the development of temperature and energy, historically prior to that of entropy, does not amount to their logical priority: Temperature should be defined in terms of entropy, not vice versa. Following the precepts of information theory, entropy is measured in bits, and coincides with information capacity at thermodynamic equilibrium. Consequently, not only is the temperature of an equilibrated system expressed in J/bit, but it acquires an operational meaning: It is the cost in energy to increase its information capacity by 1 bit. Our proposal also supports the notion of negative capacity, analogous to free energy. Finally, it simplifies Landauer's cost and clarifies that it is a cost of displacement, not of erasure.

Whether it's resumes or reports, budgets or broadsides, I'm pretty regularly sent working documents from a wide range of people, and over the years I've noticed some consistent patterns that lead those documents to be less effective than they should be. Even very smart, capable communicators routinely send important documents that distract from, or even undermine, their goals.

This isn't too surprising; we almost never never actually teach people how to use the ordinary tools of business communication in more effective ways. So, I'm gathering some advice that I regularly share with people, in hopes that this helps you get your messages across more effectively.

I started thinking about all the other important “nodal points” (I don’t know what else to call this) of people, places, books, albums, websites, etc. that all played a part in shaping who I am as a person and what I think is important. These points are a combination of seeking things out myself and getting a recommendation that felt like it was actually for me. A mixture of both passive and active knowledge acquisition.

ultimately, it's the totality of those “nodal points” that indicate one’s own unique perspective. It doesn’t matter if you specifically sought out the nodal point or not, it’s the recognition that counts. When you encounter a piece of life-changing information (no matter how large the change part is), you are simultaneously discovering and creating “yourself,” becoming incrementally more complete. Your perspective (where your gaze is directed) is made up of a meandering line through these points. Learning (or maybe some precursor to learning) is a lot about developing the intuition to recognize when something you find in the world is going to be a nodal point for you.

There are three basic strategies you can use: piling, filing, and tagging. Let’s unpack them to see where you can best use them to your advantage.

In all cases, a commonplace is a method of compiling knowledge for later use. In digital or analog form, this continued growth of stored ideas and projects is a key driver of intellectual development. Any time you decide to work on a project, you should attempt to collect and categorise all information that is relevant and useful.

In our use of digital and analogue filing tools, we classify information through folders. An article about railway construction gets filed under ‘infrastructure’ or ‘transport’. In Evernote we tag it with ‘rail’ or ‘construction’. This is thinking like a librarian and not like a writer. We are classifying the information as an input. The reason you take notes as a writer is to produce content. It makes sense, then, to take notes in line with this goal.

Traditional filing like this tends to fail when you attempt to write your content. You are stuck trying to figure out which categories will be relevant for your proposal, paper or blog post. Interesting writing often comes from connecting separate fields through a common idea. By revealing the common denominator. By unifying two seemingly-contradictory ideas. How can you possibly achieve this if you’re looking in the same category for your information? The categories simply do not fulfil the function required by the writer.

The notes you take and indeed, the way you process information, should be with a specific project or idea in mind. You must classify information in terms of its outputs. When you take notes on a book, think about how this could apply to a specific idea you had or how it argues against a paper you read last week. The premise is that you should be organising by context and always trying to connect the dots between the content you're consuming.

[We observed that] most people just used Excel to make lists. Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible at creating tables, and everyone was using Excel for tables, not calculations.

Bing! A light went off in my head.

The great horizontal killer applications are actually just fancy data structures.

Spreadsheets are not just tools for doing “what-if” analysis. They provide a specific data structure: a table. Most Excel users never enter a formula. They use Excel when they need a table. The gridlines are the most important feature of Excel, not recalc.

Word processors are not just tools for writing books, reports, and letters. They provide a specific data structure: lines of text which automatically wrap and split into pages.

PowerPoint is not just a tool for making boring meetings. It provides a specific data structure: an array of full-screen images.

Many AI products today are focused on indexing as much as possible.

...But more information isn’t always better. The limits of the ‘index everything approach’.

Index size is a trade-off against retrieval quality. A larger index can capture more information, but it also increases the risk of false positives in retrieval.

We're bombarded by more information than ever before. With the rise of all this information comes a rise of the amount of bullshit we're exposed to. Death to Bullshit is a rallying cry to rid the world of bullshit and demand experiences that respect people and their time.

...As the landslide of bullshit surges down the mountain, people will increasingly gravitate toward genuinely useful, well-crafted products, services, and experiences that respect them and their time. So we as creators have a decision to make: do we want to be part of the 90% of noise out there, or do we want to be part of the 10% of signal? It's quite simple really:

• Respect people and their time.
• Respect your craft.
• Be sincere.
• Create genuinely useful things.

Design work will look very different in the future. It’s inevitable, given the pace of technological change. How can you prepare for the future, whatever it holds? The answer is that you need to think differently about your work.

• Embrace Change
• Ground Work in the Timeless
• Adopt Models as the Object of Design

Switching between periods of capture and periods of integration allows you to reap the benefits of excitement and innovation, but also of pragmatism and problem-solving. With each cycle, you understand more and can make better-informed decisions ready for the next round. You avoid situations where you get thrown off-track or lose sight of the end goal.

The process of integration also helps you remember what you save, and makes you more likely to draw innovative connections or see unique insights. Integrating what you see with what you know can take many forms: verbal, written, sketched. If you're not sure where to start, try asking yourself these critical questions next time you see something inspiring.

The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.

Things I‘ve read, people I‘ve tried to learn from, and things I‘ve done to become a better designer. This is an idiosyncratic list reflecting what has helped me along the way, rather than an exhaustive list of design classics.

Though the list leans toward theory — principles are more durable than technique — I offer a few ideas further down about how to practice design. It also leans toward information design, because the task of presenting rich, dense information in an accessible way is ultimately the task of any digital product.

Here’s one way to improve the thing you’re writing: cut the intro.

...There’s real pressure to make a big deal out of whatever it is and turn everything we write into a thundering manifesto because we have to set up all this context and history, right? Well – no! We absolutely do not and often when we do our writing will mostly suffer for it.

There are two types of work: growth work and maintenance work.

Growth work involves making new things. It can be something big or small. In either case, growth work often follows a loose process.

Maintenance work is different. Maintenance work involves caring for the resources and instruments that make growth work possible. This includes tools, but also body and mind.

Maintenance is ultimately in service to growth. But effective growth can’t happen without maintenance. As with so many things, the ideal is a healthy balance — and it doesn’t come without struggle.

Tinderbox is a workbench for your ideas and plans, ands ideas. It can help you analyze and understand them today, and it will adapt to your changing needs and growing knowledge.

Your Tinderbox documents can help organize themselves, keeping your data clean. We believe in information gardening: as your understanding grows, Tinderbox grows with you.

While there is a lot that IA can learn from actual architecture or city planning, websites aren’t buildings or cities, and they don’t have to work like them. Instead, they should be designed according to the same principles that people’s brains expect from physical experiences.

We are surrounded by documents of all kinds, from receipts to letters, business memos to books, yet we rarely stop to reflect on their significance. Now, in this period of digital transition, our written forms as well as out reading and writing habits are being questioned and transformed by new technologies ad practices. What is the future of the book? Is paper about to disappear? With the Internet and World Wide Web, what will happen to libraries, copyright and education? Starting with a simple deli lunch receipt, Scrolling Forward examines documents of all kinds from the perspectives of culture, history, and technology in order to show how they can work and what they say about us and the values we carry into the new age.

It is the quality of thought and the information we use that determines yield, not the size or quality of the site.

With collecting comes the need to record. A specimen without a label is simply a (sometimes) pretty object. Without its associated data it is scientifically worthless.

"In today's world, boundaries are fixed, and most significant facts have been generated. Gentleman, the heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of those facts. Classification, organization, presentation. To put it another way, the pie has been made—the contest is now in the slicing."

When that loop is taken apart, and stakeholders pick and choose what they want designers to do, the value evaporates. It’s not so much a matter of those stakeholders being wrong (the loop of the design process embraces being wrong) but about the inputs being incomplete.

And incomplete inputs lead to incomplete outputs. Not visually incomplete, but conceptually incomplete: artifacts that superficially look like those produced via a complete design process, and yet don’t carry any meaningful information within them, because the decisions they were supposed to document were never made.

"You get to the point where you're about to place your wager; the race is about to be run. You evaluate the sum total of the information, which has to do with how the money has been bet, what the horses looked like on the track, all this information—and it's like you run your hand over the race—I've had this happen so many times, it's the only way to explain it—you run your hand over the race. All the information is logically there, but there's something wrong. You don't know why something is wrong, but something is not correct. Then I have to reevaluate everything in terms of this feeling I have about the thing, which is derived from information, but which is so complex and so intricate and so subtle that there's no way you can put a tag on it."

A dot went for a walk and turned into a line.
The dot, the line, the dance, the story, and the painting had found connections. Memory became learning, learning became understanding.

Learning is remembering what one is interested in. Learning, interest, and memory are the tango of understanding.

Creating a map of meaning between data and understanding is the transformation of big data into big understanding.

The dot had embraced understanding.
Understanding precedes action.
Each of us is a dot on a journey.

At this point I wish to emphasize what I believe will ultimately prove to be the greatest purpose of our museum. This value will not, however, be realized until the lapse of many years, possibly a century, assuming that our material is safely preserved. And this is that the student of the future will have access to the original record of faunal conditions in California and the west, wherever we now work. He will know the proportional constituency of our faunae by species, the relative numbers of each species and the extent of the ranges of species as they exist today.

We were very proud of our user interface and the fact that we had a way to browse 16,000 (!!) pages of documentation on a CD-ROM. But browsing the hierarchy felt a little complicated to us.

So we asked Tufte to come in and have a look, and were hoping perhaps for a pat on the head or some free advice. He played with our AnswerBook for 90 seconds, turned around, pronounced his review:

"Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care is a best-selling owner's manual for the most complicated 'product' imaginable – and it has only 2 levels of headings. You have 8 levels of hierarchy and I haven't stopped counting yet. No wonder you think it's complicated."

Information imposters: This is nonsense that masquerades as information because it is postured in the form of information. We automatically give a certain weight to data based on the form in which it is delivered to us. Because we don’t take the time to question this, we assume that we have received some information.

My favorite example of this is in cookbook recipes that call for you to “cook until done.” This doesn’t tell you very much. Why bother? Information imposters are fodder for administravitis.

When you look at phonemes, you look through the perspective of morphemes, which are one linguistic level higher. The higher level is like a prism that splits the light in two. What was one thing, like ‘length’ at the phoneme level, looks like two opposite things ‘long’ and ‘short’ from the perspective of the morphemes. In practice, when you find both a word and its opposite, then the phoneme is not about either of these two things, but about what is common to them.