Desktops, metadata and filing

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A bad metaphor

In 1973 Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center released the “Alto” personal computer. This was the first machine to boast a graphical user interface (GUI) instead of the traditional character user interface.

The Xerox PARC Alto desktop

To lessen the cognitive burden on users — then still bowler-hatted civil servants and sleeve-gartered clerks of an analog world of mailroom boys running written memoranda around the office in reusable envelopes and where “information technology” meant a Lamson Pneumatic Tube System for sending documents invoices around the organisation by a sort of commercial mortar — the designers at Xerox PARC created the metaphor of the “desktop”.

Yes, you were looking at a computer screen. But on that screen was not an impenetrable wall of orange code and a flashing cursor, but a cartoonish depiction of a literal desktop, with manila folders, a blotter, filing cabinets, in-trays and out-trays and even a dinky little wastebasket.

A better metaphor

VisiCalc on the Apple II

In 1979, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston created VisiCalc for the Apple II computer. VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program. It revolutionized business computing, allowing users easily to create and manipulate tabular data. It was a major factor in the success of the Apple II and helped drive the adoption of personal computers in businesses.

VisiCalc wasn’t nearly quite as dinky or intuitive as the desktop. It was a much purer expression of what a personal computer could do, though: it promised a powerful means of storing, augmenting, filtering, analysing and manipulating structured data. It is, of course the ancestor to that beast we all now know and love as Microsoft Excel.

Why the spreadsheet is a good metaphor

Aspreadsheet is a much better way of thinking about how to organise information on a computer than is a desktop. Being a finite, but conceptually infinite number of rows and columns, a spreadsheet tells you two things: you can have any number of items in your filing system — each occupies a single row, and there are a potentially infinite number of rows — and you can have any number of different ways of categorising those items —these are columns. Furthermore, it is up to you how you configure your columns. The conceptual scheme implied by each column is independent of all the others. Each new column of categorisation we add — the categorising information in these columns is metadata: “information about information” — is “non-destructive” of the others. Each creates its own way of ordering the information. Each is its own hierarchy. suddenly you can organise the same information in multiple different ways at once. Without upsetting anyone.

The desktop clings on

The dear old desktop was a nice, quaint idea, and it got old men in green visors over the Rubicon, but it has well outlived its purpose now. The “desktop” metaphor forces us into idiotic filing practices.

We put our files in folders, as we would do on a real desk. Sometimes a big folder might contain subfolders. And just as with a real desk, once you have put a document in one folder, you can’t very well put it anywhere else.

Because the thing is, folks, physical information that sits on a real desktop, and digital information that sits on a computer are very different ontological propositions.

Physical information, in the real world, can only be in one place at one time. Your filing system reflects this: there is a unique physical location for any single document. So do filing methodologies: older readers may remember the Dewey decimal system which categorised the entire field of non-fiction wisdom by number.

If the same document needs to be categorised in different ways this can only be achieved by duplicating it. In the physical realm, duplication was slow, imperfect and expensive and so, limited. At the time this seemed to be a drawback; with hindsight, it appears a valuable discipline.

In the digital world, the physical aspect of a document — its “substrate” — is to all intents and purposes, irrelevant. The expression this document is not worth the paper it is written on has lost its meaning because the document being the digital content embedded on the paper is the part that has value; the paper is an inconvenient imposition of physical analogue reality. In the digital realm that inconvenient imposition has gone: a “document” is nothing more that an information string: more or less costless to generate, transport, replicate and store. By simply appending metadata to such a document, it can be categorised in as many different ways, and stored in as many different places, as takes your fancy.

A better metaphor than a desktop here is a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet is ofcourse a rudimentary form of a database

Indeed the imperative is to ensure that a single document is not unnecessarily duplicated but is instead assigned metadata properties by which it can be categorised and therefore positioned in the digital firmament.

SharePoint gets a lot of hate from people who don’t use it properly. To be sure, Microsoft has not made the job of learning how to use it easy — Microsoft’s design decisions across its platform are pretty weird, so we should not be surprised — but here is a basic rule of thumb:

In SharePoint you organise by metadata, not by folders.

Folders are top-down. Metadata is bottom-up. Folders prefer form over substance. Metadata prefers substance over form.

Folders

Folders are very old economy. The folder metaphor is, literally, based on physical artefacts that can only be in one place at any time. If I put this item in the “Litigation” folder, I can’t also put it in the “Knowledge Management” folder.

Where the same unitary item deserves to be in both folders, I must therefore duplicate it. Where it is a “living thing” plotting its own miserable trajectory through the cosmos — a contract under negotiation, or a periodically updated legal template for example — then duplicating it is a bummer. It duplicates the manual task of updating all copies of the document as it changes, and that introduces the opportunity for human error. There may be miskeys. A document may be forgotten. Version control is a pain.

Also your preferred hierarchy can change, as personnel, business priorities, or circumstances change. Changing your hierarchy means completely re-engineering your folder structure.

So: a folder structure assumes a single hierarchy and multiple copies of each item.

Metadata

Metadata looks at the world the other way up. It says, “let there be a single canonical item, and multiple hierarchies.” Metadata allows you to non-destructively add hierarchies as you please. The more metadata fields you have, the more possible hierarchies there are. Unused hierarchies are almost costless.

Excel is a, well, excellent tool for managing metadata: Each row is an item and each column is a metadata point. You can add additional columns as you see fit without impacting what is already there: newly added columns are non-destructive as they augment without affecting existing ones.

In Excel you can filter sort and pivot by reference to any column in a table, in any order, and in doing so you impose a dynamic hierarchy on the items in the list. This is the magic of metadata.

SharePoint allows you to do exactly the same thing with a document library.

We intuitively understand the power of metadata when we are presented with a spreadsheet. But the same power does not occur to us when we are presented with SharePoint, even though it is, in essence, a supercharged online spreadsheet.

It is as if we take a preconceived notion of a physical library with us, and ignore our understanding of spreadsheets.

See also

• Metadata