Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.
Journal for Patterns Recognised
I'm (re)writing a literature review at the moment (ostensibly for the first chapter of my thesis), and supposedly I'm writing a book chapter in the next two weeks too.
So, in the spirit of structured procrastination, I've spent the last half an hour thinking about socialfiction.org's Journal for Patterns Recognised. Herewith some notes for an article which shouldn't get written, but about which I welcome criticism and/or encouragement.
On What It Means To Spot A Pattern
Teleological implications aside, are patterns things which want to be found? If it isn't found, is it a pattern? If it can't be found, is it a pattern?
In finding a pattern, we become familiar with it and its medium (carrier?). Is pattern-ness defined by the process of becoming familiar? Can we become familiar with a pattern-less medium? (And would that familiarity be due to anything other than repetition - another manifestation of pattern?). Is a pattern a collection of similar landmarks?
In "The Pattern On The Stone", Daniel Hillis talks about randomness, information content and entropy (I don't recall if he uses these terms). Does a random image contain more "information" than an image of a face? (Why does it take more bits to store it? Should we think about how to generate it? Is one random thing the same as another, supposing no patterns have been identified which render it non-random?)
Are patterns correspondences? Similarities? Matches? Anything we recognise? Must patterns be regular (in space or time?)
Does recognition mean implication, or causation? (cf. Gladwell's Blink - does correlation imply causation whether we want it to or not?)
Do Christopher Alexander's design patterns or the Gang of Four's analogous object-oriented design patterns work in the same way as knitting patterns? Is a pattern a framework from which we can hang information?
So we have patterns in time - repetitions, echoes and (I suppose) resonance.
So we have patterns as best practice (design/formula), a way of working which we've done before, a record of success or failure (anti-patterns?).
Generative grammars, such as languages. Do they encapsulate, generate, define or represent patterns?
Are we hard-wired for pattern recognition? Are creatures in general? (Zebra Patterns vs Long Grass and mono vision... Fly eyes... Sawipnpg lteters in the mddlie of wdros... turning mouths upside-down on upside-down images... Scott Kim's typographic inversions... Tom Coates' We See Faces In Audio Equipment... moths with eyes on wings... Eddie Izzard's evil pilot fish headlights prank... what does gestalt psychology have to say about all of this?)
Many Well-Meaning Workers Making Web Machines Work Marvellously Well
Martin Wattenburg and Marek Walczak, Marius Watz, Marcos Weskamp, Matt Webb, Matt Ward and Matt Wade.
Metadata for the Masses
Over at Adaptive Path, Peter Merholz is talking about bottom-up classification systems like the tags used to organise data on del.icio.us and Flickr. If you're not familiar with these sites - they deal with internet bookmarks and photos, respectively - one of the main features is the ability to add multiple tags (like keywords), to your data, so that you can find things easily. The tags are entered as free text, so there's very little effort involved in adding them, and they aren't intended to be complete or unique.
In his article, Merholz brings the term ethnoclassification to our attention - defined as "how people classify and categorise the world around them" - and compares the use of free tagging systems to the landscape designer's use of "desire lines" to place paving (see On The Beaten Path for a good look at emergent paths) .
He also speculates about where these bottom-up classifications are headed next,
Use the tags to understand how people consider the content at hand. Then you can “pave” the best paths to ensure findability — say, by explicitly linking “nyc,” “newyork,” and “newyorkcity.” You can also align these tags with more formal schemes, thus enhancing the utility of both.
This raises some interesting issues, not least of which is the fact that Joshua Schachter over at del.icio.us and Stuart Butterfield over at Flickr seem hostile towards anything which might be seen as an attempt to standardise tagging systems. Merholz isn't suggesting standardisation here, but it's easy to get onto a slippery slope. Once we realise "nyc", "newyork", and "newyorkcity" are similar then the temptation is to merge them, but for all we know, the distinction may be important to some users. The solution is to offer browsing of multiple tags as if they were one (a union of tags) as an optional view of the data.
This is why the emergent paths comparison is a good one, especially in the case of del.icio.us where it's easy to see how similar tags could be suggested through usage, because different people will be adding and tagging the same URLs. In the case of Flickr though, tag consensus will be harder to reach unless tagging is opened up to everyone, perhaps to tag their collections of favourites. That way, when people search for a particular tag, Flickr could use the favourites tags to offer related tag suggestions. Because it is an optional query refinement rather than a unification of terms, it then becomes an interface issue and not a complex and unwanted database normalisation task. Over at del.icio.us, Joshua is already experimenting with user/tag similarity suggestions, hopefully Flickr will soon.
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