h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Orthogonal" means "at a right angle to" in the same way that "diagonal" means "at a sloping angle to". You can safely ignore this, but I can't: I sit in meetings where consultants use the term "orthogonally" in cold blood. These meetings are about how to devise taxonomies for knowledge bases. Taxonomies are ways of categorising things and sorting them out. Sheep or goats. Tea or coffee. PC or Mac.


Let's start again, shall we?



There, that's better.


How should we sort out the Guide?

How we do this depends on who wants to use it and how. I have a vision of three or four typical users.

User 1 is having a break at work and wants something to read on their PC alongside their favourite bloggers, the Onion, and a couple of Op Ed pieces or newspaper columnists.

User 2 is the same person, and wants something to read on their commute.

User 3 is a traveller in a hurry, they are somewhere they've not been before and want to know about Places to See and Things to Do.

User 4 is the same traveller, but they've got a bit more time; they want to know about the history of the place they are visiting, something about the films it's featured in, the books written about it, or about the people who've lived there in the past.

And of course there is

User 5 who just wants to write for the Guide.

But let's think about and for the time being.



It strikes me that and will be using a smartphone of some sort. http://xkcd.com/548/ thinks it's a Kindle, but it could be an iPhone or whatever.

So... if I am or then how would I want to search?

If I'm reading on my commute then I might be happy with happenstance. I'd like to read entries served to me by the infinite improability drive or just the lastest ones. Or maybe I've a fondness for a particular genre: say I want to be served up opinion pieces. Or anecdotes about peoples lives. Or maybe I'm interested in particular subjects: I've a fondness for history, or want to read about insects, or biographies. Or Science EXplained. All easy enough, so long as the entries are sensibly tagged. I say "show me stuff about gardening" and my smartapp offers me stuff about gardening.

But if I am a traveller in a hurry or one headed for the beach then I want to be offered stuff that's specific to my location. My smartphone knows where I am, and entries are (or can be) tagged geographically, so that's easy enough too. If I'm in a hurry then I want "guidebook" entries; real "what-to-see-and-do" ones. If I've got more time then anything tagged with my "location" would be interesting, or maybe "location + history" to narrow it down a bit, or "location + biography". Or... or.... or.....

So here, at long last, is the question.



What ways of categorising the Guide would be useful to readers in these different scenarios?

Ways, plural, note. These categories don't need to be hierarchies. They can be ... wait for it ... wait .... orthogonal.


Here are my suggestions:

Location - eg Islington, London, UK, Europe,
People - eg Douglas Adams, Marilyn Monroe, Count Dracula
Time - eg Paeolithic, Bronze Age, Han Dynasty, 19th Century, '80s
Genre - .... now here I get a bit stuck. What would be good genres?

And as for Subject - well I don't know about you, but Dewy doesn't Do it for me...



So - what would be good ways to tag the Guide?

PS - let's not forget the writers - I truly think there is scope even in the smartapp world I've just described - for excellent writing of every kind.

The genres I came up with off the top of my head were:

Factual, Fiction, Opinion, Experience (and another one, which I've forgotten).

I like your users, though. It makes sense to think of them in those terms. I did a couple of things in my visit to Canada because I was beaing user 4 . No smartphone for me though, I was researching the place before I went so it was all PC.

I *knew* you'd have thoughts on this, Vip!

No thoughts - I've washed way too many floors this weekend for that - but I loved the Kindle cartoon

I only wish I had more actual thoughts, Ben! I personally love the idea of being able to go to a place and discover an informative, well thought out history and guide to e town. But I would also love to be able to pull up a beautiful memory of someone who grew up there, a visitor's impression, a local's review of some local pubs and a piece of fiction set there. It all adds to the colour of the place. I also wouldn't mind there being two different Entries on the same place, as long as they came from different angles and expressed different opinions.

Please apologise any typos, I've borrowen Mr Vip's iPad so I find that I type very fast but with poorer accuracy!

>> Factual, Fiction, Opinion, Experience <<

These genres could be concieved (at first glance) to be Entries about a specific part of town or happening and not for sightseeing in general.

I suggest adding "PtG/TtD" (Places to Go/Things to Do) or some similar indication to the list for the #4 that wants to know about the place in a broad sense. An Entry in the "Ptg/TtD" can contain pointers to any of the other genres for Entries with more information about a building or about the quality of the tea served somewhere.

The "Ptg/TtD" genre could be like a travel brochure for a particular town but viewed from the perspective of 'A Tourist'.
For instance:
In Canterbury (I've been there a long time ago) I went to the guided walk-through museum "Canterbury Tales" where you walk along the exhibiton while a headphone gives you the background noise for that specific piece and you can choose to listen to tales and information in a language you choose (4 or 5 available by selecting it on the reciever). [Link to another Entry with more information].
The Cathedral is magnificent and was certainly worth the visit [Link].

Get my drift ?
It could well be a mashup of several Entries of the genre 'Experience' collected by someone who likes to tell visitors what "PtG/TtD" are in his/her place of residence.

Hey, hold on. It's... it's... A guide by people for the people. It almost sounds like... the h2g2!

Oh, one more thingy: The start of this thread should be in Ask. If only to spark more discussion and Thinking.

Cheers!
Martin
---
I know where my towel is. It says so on the towel.

Renaming the fact section would be the best bet. Perhaps Info? Something that gives the impression that it is factual without sounding as dry and boring as actually using factual. Or info, for that matter, that would be just as bad!

But regardless, it doesn't seem to me that we could get away with just four categories. What have I missed out??

>> What have I missed out?? <<
Ummm... Travel ?

Oooh, oooh, ooh!
"HitchHiking" !

HN had a list of categories in the Stockholm thread. I think it was fairly early on... hang on...

Post 157

F19585?thread=8029882&skip=140&show=20

I suppose that might be a bit too long though.

To repeat from the other thread :

-Fact
-Fiction
-Opinion
-Humor
-Personal narrative
-Pub, Restaurant, or other venue reviews
-Book, Film, Theatre, Computer Game, or other media reviews
-Travelogues
-Prose
-Poetry
-Cartoon
-First person narratives
-A blending of fact and fiction, called variously historical fiction, fictionalized history, "this is based on a true story", etc.
-A summary of some of our more long running threads, some of which are more or less text-based MUSHs (Multi-User Shared Hallucinations).

I would tone it down to :
* Fact
* Fiction
* Opinion - contains Personal narrative and Reviews
* Experience - contains Travelogue and First person narrative
* Entertainment (?) - contains Humour, Prose, Poetry and Historical Fiction

Cheers!
Martin
---
I know where my towel is. It says so on the towel.

This is interesting sruff.

The beauty of on-line categoried is that your 'book' can be on several shelves at once. A book about Mary Queen of Scots can be in History, Biography, Scotland, and Feminism, say.

Here's a question - how does having fewer subject categories each with more entries in them vs more categories with a few very specific entries in them help or hinder our different readers?

Serendipitous reading to make the commute go by
The traveller needing information in a hurry
The traveller with a bit more time to soak thing up

And here ar a coulple more, which I think may be the same or may be different:
the hobbyist or the student who are looking things up, either for advice on how to do something (build a wall, bake a cake, grow apples) or for information fo a class

The question is, how often does anyone actually use categories to find entries?

More important is a good search feature. Key words seem more useful than hierarchal categories.

A great addition for the future would definitely be geolocational indexing. How that could be implemented with so many legacy articles though could be quite a task.

Anyhoo... just my .

The scale of the task is terrifying, CZ. I hope some of it at least could be scripted. But if yoiu want to work out how big your elephant is, you first have to think of an elephant.

I'd been blurring the difference between categories and tagging, tbh. I think formal categories have their place, even if the values they can take are free text (eg leaving it up to whoever categorises an entry do decide between "Elizabeth Tudor" and "Elizabeth I" for example). The problem with tagging is it is SO dependent on whoever sets the tags. Google has spoiled us.

What I am trying to do in this thread is get ideas out of people's heads and on to the screen. I am hopeful that I can persuade one of h2g2's librarians along, but all the ones I know are ludicrously busy right now. They have real lives, and everything.

Ben

Great thread.

In this, somehow we have to integrate that much of the interesting reading is off the beaten format...

In other words, if I had 10 minutes to kill as a new visitor, and was browsing hootoo like I'd browse the Onion, I'd more likely be interested by the UG archive, bits of the Post (but only bits...) or even some of the classic conversation threads.

We also need to somehow handle the fact that there are vast reams of content that are interesting but dead (all that role playing architecture from 2000 - cafés, pubs, even sewers. Try posting a comment in there now...) and then a more limited area that is live.

sprout

The point of using categories is not to establish hierarchy but to clarify the gist of the Entry when it shows up in a searchresult.
If the hasty traveller wants factual information on something it's nice for him/her to see that the first three results in the search are fictional/entertainment/whatever so these can be skipped.
This is specially handy when you are working with a small-screen device like a Blackberry.

The tags are non-hierarchical keywords attached to the Entry that can be used in the search.

Geo-locationing can be additional information a Researcher can attach to the Entry and I think there are enough volunteers that would rise to the occasion to help the geolocationally challenged Entries.

Cheers!
Martin
---
I know where my towel is. It says so on the towel. How about You ? http://www.mapservices.org/myguestmap/map/h2g2

I would use categories and then sub categories for a specification.

for instance:

fact > biology
fact > history


fiction > poetry
fiction > science fiction


1st person something > opinion
1st person something > experience

But it's never that easy. I had quite a time doing the UG archives.

Even fiction > poetry doesn't always hold. Eg A21736686.

On fact > history yardsworth of posts are possible debating that, so much history having been written from particular viewpoints, or with the victor's hindsight.

In the fact to fiction range there's a lot of overlap in the middle. Imo we need the librarians' help in how to tag without having to make that disinction. A reference tag on clearly 'reference' entries is my best offering on it.

>>> Even fiction > poetry doesn't always hold. Eg A21736686.

Well, no wonder! Doesn't Poetry go under Literature?

The two classification systems I'm familiar with are Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal. Either one would do for a start of the main classifications of works.