Nov 23 2007
Organising information
You can tell a lot about what information is used for by how it is stored. Or at least, you should be able to tell, because it should be organised in such a way that it’s really easy to access. Dictionaries are in alphabetical order by keyword. The Icelandic telephone book is alphabetised by given name, since the Icelandic culture has no family names. Each person’s second name is modelled on the first name of one of their parents.
Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowchart; it’ll be obvious. — Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month
Organising information badly can be a powerful impediment to efficiency. It’s amazing how much easier some tasks become when the information you require is organised in the right way. A thesaurus isn’t ordered alphabetically, but grouped by theme. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to find a word in a thesaurus if it didn’t also have the alphabetical list at the back?
I’m interested in data structures from a computer science perspective. It’s amazing what a difference good data structures can have on the efficiency and comprehensibility of a program. But you don’t have to delve into the world of programming to work this out.
Do you remember Choose Your Own Adventure books? I read a few, but they were always really disappointing. I spent half the time backtracking from abrupt deaths and very little time enjoying the reading. Games which require lots of decisions are really not suited to book format, unless you enjoy spending most of your time hunting for the next page in the story.
There is a natural symmetry between the linear format of a book, and the linear format of a plot. A branching tree of decisions, such as a game, doesn’t fit into this system. And the result is an extremely disappointing game/book hybrid. Organising data for efficient retrieval is, in some cases, a full-time job. You can even get degrees in librarianship, or get paid lots of money as a database analyst.
Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around. — Eric S Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar
By way of contrast, the best data retrieval system I have ever come across is due to Mike, one of Helen’s old flatmates. The problem is typical: how to organise a CD collection for quick retrieval of good tunes. On reflection, all standard methods of organisation are sub-optimal. Alphabetising doesn’t work, because no-one thinks, “I’d like to listen to some L music today”. Organisation by style doesn’t work unless you can cut tracks out of CDs and move them to other discs.
My problem, especially when faced with a large collection, is two-fold. Indecision coupled with the secretary problem. I don’t know what to listen to, and if I make a decision I’m very sure there’s a better album buried in there, somewhere. What I do have is a good idea of what I don’t want to listen to. So, all you need to do is reorganise all the CDs so they’re in the wrong boxes. If you think “I don’t know what I want, but it’s definitely not Bach” you can happily put on whatever you find in the box labelled JS Bach: Cello Suites.
Alas, as with all other data structures, you must offset advantages in one place with disadvantages elsewhere. Finding good music is O(1). Finding a particular album is O(n). (I suppose it would be n-1, since it’s never in the box which it’s supposed to be in, but this is the same thing.) Oh well!
I think you are absolutely right about not listening to “L music,” on a given day. In my freshman year of college, I realized that I would spend ten minutes deciding on what to listen to for half of one hour. This was because capturing the mood was my primary goal. I made a connection, though: Mood was largely dependent upon weather and my surrounding environment. Thusly, I organized my compact disc collection by season.
This has proven to be very successful for me, if highly subjective. A few advantages follow:
Music is now organized in a more linear fashion. At any given time of the year, I really only need a very limited selection of the whole collection, which I think is true of how many people listen to music.
Recalling the position of a particular piece is easy because it is automatically associated with seasons, weather, and holidays. When the leaves turn red and the air feels brisk it is really easy to remember what you were listening to last year at the same time–and since the seasons are largely unique, you will not have false positives.
Similarly, new music is automatically associated with when it is first heard, so filing it is a cinch. I fell in love with the music of Jenny Watson last year in late October, so that is where it lives now. And I have Ima Robot to look forward to with the new year. Et cetera.
As I mentioned, this is highly subjective, so I cannot know if this would work for others. But it relies on personal memories which are very strong and formed by sense association and without real effort, so making sense of the order and remembering the filing is done very readily. Furthermore, the seasons are divided up into three sub-categories (Early, Middle, Late) which loosely correspond to months of the calendar year.
I think the trick is to find how you listen to music and how you experience it and then organize it accordingly. After all, a good data structure should be as transparent as possible, right? Otherwise one ends up tracking down the pages in a fantasy book for the next part of a non-linear story. The autobiographical organization scheme featured in the film High Fidelity uses concepts very similar to my own; whereas his is linear, mine is circular. Find something based on how you work and the rest will fall into place.
I just wrote a lot about a very trivial topic, so please forgive my intrusion onto your space. Hopefully it is at the very least interesting.
AC, thanks for the response. I’m always happy to hear how people think about organising their music. It’s such a trivial thing so people often get quite creative.
Yes, no doubt. I forgot to bookmark your blog, so it has taken me a few days to track it back down to see if you had responded.
I had a friend in college who organized his entire, gigantic collection by color. Of the album cover. It baffled my mind, but it worked for him. That is probably the best I have known; these days, it is pretty much not needed, thanks to iTunes. I still set up smart playlists and use the “grouping” metadata field to tag them with seasons. I even got to use my “Christmas” smart playlist earlier this evening.
AC, i am totally with you on the seasonal approach. For years and years my cds were organised chronologically by ME, which is to say that I kept them in the order in which I’d acquired them.
I always knew exactly where things were, because I could put them in context, imagine the setting, listen around and go jumping right back to high school in 1998 and all that angst or what ever other mood I cared to drum up.
Eventually my cd collection got to be a bit big for this method- I think also I stopped listening to cds so intensively when I first got them (or I’d have had them on mp3 for ages and buying the album was just a formality) and so it ceased to work so fluidly. Also, Dougal hated never being able to find my cds without asking me.
Eventually I went alphabetical. I still don’t find it natural.