Week 13: Information Condensation, Or, It's Only a Model!

This week’s reading: Borgmann, Part 2

“Holding On to Reality” is simultaneously the most general and the most personal treatment of information science I’ve yet read as part of the library science curriculum, and reading it is exhilarating. I’m not ready yet to address Ess’s analysis of Borgmann cited in the lecture notes, since Ess focuses primarily on Part 3 of Borgmann. Instead, I’ll return this week to the needs of users – a focal component of IA – and discuss what user needs have to do with Borgmann’s treatment of information.

Tying physical architecture to his discussion of the distinction between signs and things, Borgmann opines, “No design can specify its realization fully. To convey exactly as much information as the thing realized, a design would have to exhibit just as many features as the thing. But then it would be a duplicate of . . . the thing” (p. 113). That is, a fully realized (or fully imagined) thing must necessarily lose fidelity when it is condensed into a sign. Borgmann’s insight here is the very principle that makes indexers, abstracters, and information architects necessary. Many library users, and information consumers in general, need to know what they’re accessing before they access it. But to know exactly what a journal article says without reading the article is impossible by Borgmann’s principle. Users, then, need a general idea of what an article says – a low-fidelity version of the article. The job of an abstracter is to reduce a cataloged item (a thing) to an abstract of a more digestible length (a sign) with minimal loss of fidelity. A good abstracter makes it possible for users to make reasonable guesses about where a sign points without having to walk down the indicated road and see for themselves.

Labeling components of an information architecture is precisely analogous to abstracting media; it requires the same faculty of condensation, and has much the same end in mind in terms of how the user is served. Yet one difference between information architecture and physical architecture, which is Borgmann’s subject in Chapter 10, is that an edifice, once built, is stripped of the cultural signs used in its creation. The low-fidelity artifice of the blueprint outlives its usefulness, and the building’s users rarely need a blueprint to navigate the building. By contrast, abstracts and labels within an information system are useful precisely because they are condensed, and are indispensable for users long after the system goes live. There seems to be a fundamental disanalogy here: we can apprehend a building with our senses, and hence we navigate a building with the aid of natural signs (like a luggage carousel in an airport or a blackboard in a school) as well as cultural ones, while an information architecture is invisible to the senses and we can navigate it only through cultural signs and the guidance of the architect. Exploring a building is inherently an interactive experience; exploring an information architecture is not.

I think that this idea – the idea that an information architect must also be an information tour guide, providing signs that are naturally deficient in an online environment – is a key to overcoming user frustration with website interfaces and layouts. Since we cannot be physically present to help our users with their needs, our indexing and labeling functions are crucial to this aim. Just as John Harrison’s robust mechanical clock effectively condensed the vast grid of the world map into a longitude (p. 78), our navigation tools need to clearly help the user locate herself within the architecture; and rather like that map’s rigorous grid makes the sign revisable to match the thing, we should be ready to relabel our websites in a way that better matches the thing, or even revise the thing to match user expectations. This last possibility – the ability of the information architect to revise online reality for the convenience of the user – is probably the most exciting aspect of information architecture, and it might well be the subject of Borgmann’s Part 3, subtitled “Information As Reality.”