Gmail, Technorati, WinFS - cogitating reticulation

I am ever-so-slightly synesthetic[1] when it comes to words. Take the word 'reticulation', for example. I recently added this one to my vocabulary. In my mind's eye, the word appears as a square sheet of aluminum, folded into origami patterns, painted the color of hubris, smelling of harpsichord and humming like magenta.

Actually, no, it doesn't. I made that up. Making up silly definitions of words helps me to stop forgetting them. I do not want to forget what 'reticulation' means. It is too useful a word to forget. Besides, this article could not exist without it.

Pull up a chair and I'll tell you what happened. It all started when I made a comment on my blog[2] to the effect that hierarchies are things we cannot think within, but equally cannot think without. I am not quite sure what it means but it sounded good at the time.

A fellow blogger, Hamish Harvery[3] linked to my blog and recommended Arthur Koestler's book 'The Ghost in the Machine'. I have not read it yet but I understand that it talks about social structures. It talks about how we create organizational hierarchies (arborization) and then join these hierarchies together into complex organizational networks (reticulation).

What on Earth am I talking about? Sit back down on that chair and I'll tell you. I am talking about digital information and how it is organized. I am talking about how we humans manage to navigate the infinite seas of digital information without our heads exploding.

Here is how we do it. If your head works the way most people's heads work, your first port of call in organizing raw information of any form is to put it into a hierarchy. There comes a point however, where you find that hierarchies are not enough to capture the rich structure of information. You start to join bits of hierarchies to each other in complex ways. As information hierarchies mature, they have a way of ceasing to be pure hierarchies. Arborization turns to reticulation.

We humans have been doing arborization for a long, long time. From the Dewey Decimal Classification system to Taxonomies of living things. We humans take to hierarchies like fish take to water. They combine great power with great simplicity. It helps greatly that hierarchies map naturally to the physical world of words on pieces of paper. Hierarchies have a natural ally in paper books as they can be linearized into a sequence of pages. If you have ever looked at a table of contents (say 'yes') then you know what I mean.

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