(Here follows some noodling that I might turn into something longer and more polished. It’s also tangentially related to my “Why research is hard” series of posts.)
Recently the Internet Scout Report featured Cornell University’s online guide to birds. Curious about an unfamiliar bird I’d spotted, I figured I’d try a sample search. I was hoping to be able to browse by characteristics like color and size; but Cornell’s site arranges its birds alphabetically and by taxonomic order. I quickly realized that the guide is aimed at people who know more about birds than I do. And while it was interesting to browse the entries — among other things, I confirmed that the woodpeckers I’ve seen around my neighborhood were the red-bellied and pileated varieties — my mystery bird remained unidentified, because I lack the prior knowledge to guess what kind of bird it was.
I’m interested in this question of the prior knowledge one needs to navigate any kind of information-organization system. It pops up in all kinds of places — most obviously, for library and info-sciences people, in the design of things like OPACs and subject classifications, but in more mundane contexts as well. Consider what happens when you go into the video store. If you already know that you want to rent, say, Moulin Rouge, you have to know two things: its genre (musical) and its title. If you want a foreign film, you also need to know the country of origin. Or you might just think, vaguely, “hmm, I’m in the mood for a martial arts movie,” and head for the appropriate section.
But if you go to my local video store, you need an extra level of prior knowledge, because a lot of the movies there
are organized by the director’s last name instead of the title.* This is great if you go in thinking “Robert Altman! Definitely in an Altman frame of mind!”, but less easy if you want Gosford Park and can’t remember that Altman directed it. You also have to know whether the movie you’re looking for is independent or not, because independent
movies have their own room.** There are lots of video guides sitting around all over the store, which people can and do use to look up directors’ names.
The great thing about Sneak Reviews is that it restructures the browsing experience so it’s less about genre (though there are a number of genre sections, including “based on Shakespeare” and “classic monster movies,” the latter subcategorized by monster) than about exposure to the whole range of a director’s work, or to “independent movies” as a larger category. Which means that a customer can stumble upon something he or she might not have stumbled upon at Blockbuster. But it also means that the casual browser might come away thinking “I’m not a film major. I don’t know enough to find a movie here.” In fact, the first time I went to Sneak Reviews, I had a moment of great sympathy for every undergraduate I’ve ever encountered who couldn’t figure out LC subject headings or didn’t know the author’s-last-name-first convention.
On the one hand, it’s an obvious hindrance when someone finds a classification scheme useless because the prior-knowledge bar is set too high. On the other, it’s hard to predict exactly what a potential audience of users will already know. (I’m now having flashbacks to teaching writing classes: both what I used to say to them about Knowing Thy Audience and how I used to worry about connecting with what they did and didn’t know.) And there’s also something to be said for the opportunities for serendipity that an unusual classification scheme offers — I’m thinking here of Rochelle Mazar’s post on “Subjective Organization and Serendipity,” for instance. I think the Prior Knowledge Dilemma will always be with us, but it can at least be a guiding factor in how we arrange our information: who is this resource for, and what happens if people with different areas of knowledge try to use it?
* Which suggests that whoever came up with Sneak Reviews’ organizational system subscribes to the auteur theory.
** My favorite thing about Sneak Reviews is the “Bad” section, which has four shelves labeled “Bad,” “Really Bad,” “So Bad It’s Good,” and “You Won’t Believe How Bad.” Oddly, Plan 9 from Outer Space, which a lot of critics consider
the worst movie ever made, is in the Independent section with the rest of Ed Wood’s oeuvre.
