IsisInBlog

Names on a Memorial: Into the Earth (Memorials Discovered by the Strategic Information Arrangement Class)

Today is Memorial Day.  On Friday the American military announced its 1000^th death in Afghanistan.  Yesterday, British Petroleum announced that it failed in its fourth attempt to stop the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

We study name arrangement on memorials during the final week of my online Strategic Information Arrangement class at Simmons College.  That week includes an optional forum question asking class members to describe a memorial near their home.      

Jared Stern, a Brandeis University pre-school librarian who also works at the Boston Public Library, told us about the New England Holocaust Memorial by Stanley Saitowitz, with Polish extermination camps represented by six columns extending six feet into the earth and 54 feet into the sky.  Smoke rises from “smoldering coals” toward the columns’ glass panels filled with 6,000,000 numbers evoking the tattoos of Holocaust prisoners. 

Some panels have quotations instead of numbers.  Jared included one in his remarks:     

“At first the bodies were burned, they were buried.  In January 1944, we were forced to dig up the bodies so they could be burned.  When the last mass grave was opened, I recognized my whole family, my mother and sisters and their kids.  They were all in there. (Motke Zaidt, a Holocaust survivor who was deported from Lithuania and forced to work the death detail in Chelmno.)”

Beth Toren, Web Services Librarian at West Virginia University Libraries discussed two types of memorials for the mine disasters in her state.  An April 5 explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine killed 29 miners.  The community responded by building spontaneous memorials such as one with pieces of coal painted white with the names of those who died written in black.  It sits on lace on the ground with a cross.

The Sago Mine exploded on January 2, 2006, killing twelve miners; one survived.  This has a formal memorial in Phillippi, although it is not complete.  The photo in this post shows Ross Straight’s flat 4’ x 6’ sculpture, with figures arranged as the bodies were found when rescuers finally reached them. 

Beth spoke with the project’s organizer who said the memorial is intended to honor all who died in the mines, but they will only list the names of the twelve who died at Sago.  According to Beth’s paraphrase, “they would never be able to fit all the miners’ names that died in coalmine accidents just in that county on a memorial.”  Today, as oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, we also remember eleven energy workers who died last month when the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded.      

Vermont’s Sharon North Welcome Center on I-89 demonstrates green design with sustainable energy and water facilities.  That’s where Edee Edwards, taxonomy manager at a bio-pharmaceutical services company, found Vermont Vietnam Veterans Memorial.  This first state-sanctioned Vietnam memorial was dedicated two weeks prior to DC’s memorial.  It includes both the names of those who died and of every Vermonter who served. 

The memorial also has separate installations for those who died in Iraq and in Afghanistan.  These include not just names, but photos and remarks about their lives.  Since 1983, an all night vigil has been held every Memorial Day.  Edee said that even though she does not feel connected with the war in Vietnam, “this project ended up not just making me think, but making me feel.” 

In the 90’s, the Sharon rest stop almost closed, but Vermont’s Vietnam vets lobbied to keep it open.  Ten years ago, the state selected it to be renovated as a green showcase, designed by Timothy D. Smith.  Using ground source heat pumps, the center keeps warm in the cold Vermont winter and cool in the summer, not by extraction, but by sending reclaimed water into 24 wells to return with the earth’s own heat.  Take a look at the worst oil spill in U.S. history.  Instead of stealing her blood, we should let the earth nurture us with geothermal energy.

Photo Credit:  West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin’s Photo Gallery.  Album:  Sago Mine Memorial Unveiling, May 21, 2009. 

The Mother Road: Arrangement for a Rhyme

Anyone in a group photo knows about spatial information arrangement.  To display who’s who, names are usually arranged by their place in the photo -- left to right, in rows, clockwise.  For photos, alphabetical order would require a location statement (third row, second from the left), so it’s a lot easier and more helpful to organize the names by spatial placement.

Geography is a subset of spatial arrangement.  Here information is listed by how it appears on the land.  Written travel guides often organize the sights in the order in which tourists encounter them on the road.  The guide might put a prominent attraction first, veering from geography for the sake of customer convenience.  The authors know where the tourists are really heading, so they make things easier by incorporating order-of-importance into the spatial arrangement.      

The many guides to Route 66 usually begin in Chicago and head west to LA.  US 66 followed the trail of American westward expansion, so this direction makes historic sense.  As a native Californian, now an Arizonan, and an adventurous driver, I often find myself traveling backwards on the few remaining stretches of the Mother Road. 

“Route 66,” Bobby Troup’s hit song, maintains the east-west travelogue with one exception, “Gallup, New Mexico; Flagstaff, Arizona; don't forget Winona.”  Winona is east of Flagstaff so an accurate listing would be Gallup, Winona, and Flagstaff. 

Troup had an arrangement parameter that took precedence over the map.  He needed a rhyme.  For those lines, he returned eastward.  Even so, Troup maintains geography, signaling a change in direction with “don’t forget Winona.”  Then he heads west again to Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino.

If you ever plan to motor west,
travel my way; take the highway that’s the best.
Get your kicks on Route Sixty Six!

It winds from Chicago to L.A.,
more than two thousand miles all the way.
Get your kicks on Route Sixty Six!

Now you go through St. Looey, Joplin, Missouri
and Oklahoma City is mighty pretty
You'll see Amarillo, Gallup, New Mexico,
Flagstaff, Arizona; don't forget Winona,
Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino.

Won’t you get hip to this timely tip:
When you make that California trip,
get your kicks on Route Sixty Six!

 

Bobby Troup, “Route 66” in The Great American Songbook: The Singers.  Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 2007, pages 274-277.

Names on a Memorial: The Power of Information Arrangement

Today’s post honors Phillip Gibbs and James Green, killed shortly after midnight on May 15, 1970 by police at Jackson State College in Mississippi.  On May 4 of that year, Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder were killed by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University.

This post will also be the Memorial Day essay for Discover the Region, where some of my writings will now be published.

Like all language, organized information persuades.  It “directs our thinking,” as biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote about classification.  Information arrangement shapes perception and interaction.  Names on memorials are examples of organized information where arrangement defines a visitor’s experience.  The thoughtful chronology of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial builds a space for individual remembrance.  A World War I memorial does the same, but with a different arrangement strategy, reflecting the difference in the two wars.  In contrast, the random arrangement proposed for the World Trade Center memorial almost derailed the project.  Yet, in another context, random builds community at the Memorial Temples of Burning Man.   

By listing names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) in chronological order, designer Maya Lin gave surviving Vietnam Vets personal spaces for contemplation, spaces that make the VVM our most powerful memorial.  Names are arranged by date of casualty, not date of death.  Those who died later of wounds received in battle are listed on the day of the battle along with their buddies who died that day or went missing.  When a surviving soldier visits the VVM, he need only remember one name to look up in the index.  He finds the panel and sees the names of his friends who died in a battle he fought.  They remain together where he can visit them and remember his own experience.   

Architect Edwin Lutyens influenced Lin with his World War I Memorial to the Missing of the Somme.  This open structure of 16 huge columns, with intersecting arches and a truncated tower in Thiepval, France lists more than 72,000 names on its huge columns, names of British soldiers missing from a single battle.  Like the VVM, the memorial gives survivors an individual place of remembrance, but the two use different arrangements to achieve the same goal.  The VVM honors over 58,000 dead or missing during a 20 year war.  The Somme memorial lists those missing from a five month battle, most from a one day massacre when British troops surged into waiting German lines.     

In World War I, Britain recruited Pals Battalions.  Men who signed up together could serve the entire war with their buddies.  Cities and towns mustered their own fighting units, sending them off to France with names like the Sheffield City Battalion.  On July 1, 1916, many of these towns lost nearly a generation of young men. 

The names on the Somme memorial are arranged by British Army Order of Precedence.  That’s how military units appear on the parade ground.  These units came from individual towns, so the arrangement has the effect of organizing missing soldiers by their home towns.  Even today, with only a few remaining World War I vets, relatives and neighbors have their own place of remembrance.

Michael Arad, designer of New York’s National September 11 Memorial, ignored individual places of remembrance when he selected random as the arrangement.  This would have dispersed names from each company all over the monument.  Instead of a personal place to remember fallen coworkers, survivors would have had to hike to see each name.  The arrangement infuriated surviving families and they eventually refused to contribute to the memorial fund.  At that point, the design committee reconsidered and offered “meaningful adjacencies.”  Families can now place their loved one’s name within a group or next to an individual.  Many names will appear with the companies they worked for, but they might also be with special friends.  In one case, a married couple who worked at different companies will now be forever together on the memorial. 

The designers of the National September 11 Memorial paid dearly for an arrangement error, losing money, prestige and the community’s good will.  They went from simplistic random to perhaps the most complex arrangement on any memorial with individualized name placement and multiple types of groupings.  If the designers had originally selected an obvious arrangement, such as geographic by floor, survivors would have had their places of remembrance.  They would not have needed strong family associations to fight against the arrangement and ultimately to fight for a more detailed names design. 

In the right context, however, even random can build private spaces of remembrance.  David Best did this at Nevada’s Burning Man art festivals.  His Memorial Temples in 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004 reflect the Somme memorial as arched open structures, topped with a tower and filled with names.  Burners inscribe the names they want to remember anywhere on the memorial.  The effect is random, but each inscription describes a private remembrance.  For the week of the festival, Burners have a personal place to grieve, a place they have chosen.  When the Temple burns on Sunday, individual memories and the combined memories of all Burners float into the evening sky.

Practice What You Preach: Manipulating First Place

In my previous post, “Creative Literary and Pragmatic Lists”, I indicated that one creative component of a pragmatic list is the selection of a category to sit in first place.  When I added the essay to my “Directory of Postings,” I realized my first place was “Arrangement Structures > Alphabetical Order.”

Of all arrangement structures, alphabetical order is certainly the most boring.  In addition, there are people, some in the information industry, who hate alphabetical order.  They feel it has no meaning, which of course is its beauty.  But do I really want my first category to be something that is both boring and controversial?

So I need to put a category in front of “Alphabetical Order,” which is not so easy.  My Directory is hierarchical with categories alphabetized.  If I keep “Arrangement Structures” as the first major category, I need a structure that appears earlier in the alphabet than “Al.”  There ain’t one.  The alphabet is alpha.  The word is based on the Greek word for “A.” It’s supposed to be first, which is one way it keeps its primacy.

The next idea places a different major category into first place.  It has to fit in the alphabet before “Arrangement Structures.”  My second major category is “Arrangement Theory.”  I need a word for theory that begins with a letter before “S.”  That word is “Principles.”

My first category is now “Arrangement Principles > Categories.”  Not controversial, but not very sexy either.  So I look at the first few categories of arrangement principles:

Categories
Findability
Information Architecture
Knowledge Development
Parameters
Perspective
Persuasive Strategies

I could find a synonym for categories, but “Findability” is not very sexy either.  The sexiest is “Persuasive Strategies,” a phrase I use often so I can’t change it.  Then I realize all I have to do is put “Arrangement” in front of a category and my problem is solved.

Unfortunately, “Arrangement Persuasive Strategies” is awkward and changes a phrase I use often.  “Findability,” “Information Architecture,” and “Knowledge Development” also awkward, plus lots of people work in those areas.  I want to feature something where I am the primary practitioner.

That brings us to “Parameters” and “Perspective.”  “Arrangement” fits nicely in front of both.  But “Parameters” is a little amorphous.  I use it to represent the sometimes odd characteristics that must be considered in an arrangement.  For example, in “Working with Parameters,” a post about my client Snoopy, I discuss building an arrangement around Bloglines’ inability to accurately display spreadsheets.

Which leaves “Arrangement Perspective.”  How delightful.  I always promote designing arrangements from the perspective of the user.  And there’s an added bonus, a double meaning.  “Arrangement Perspective” could also mean my perspective on arrangement, which is what IsisInBlog is all about.              

Creative Literary and Pragmatic Lists

Umberto Eco’s four month Louvre exhibit about lists finished its run in February.  So if you want to see his “Mille e tre,” exhibit, you’ll have to get the beautiful catalog, The Infinity of Lists, with essays by Eco about the history of lists, along with examples of literary lists and photos of lists in visual art.  One shows a painting of edible vegetation combined to make a realistic human face with a zucchini nose (p. 130).

Following the trail of Eco’s footnotes, I found a delightful book about literary lists by Robert E. Belknap, The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing.  Belknap distinguishes between literary lists and pragmatic lists, the type usually made by my readers. 

We expect creativity in literature and lists are no exception.  Here’s an example from Tom Sawyer identifying the contents of Tom’s pockets as “a lump of chalk, an indiarubber ball, three fish hooks, and one of that kind of marbles known as a ‘sure ‘nough crystal’” (Belknap, p. 17).  Belknap shows how Twain’s language enhances each object, with the marble given “the privileged, anchoring, final spot” (p. 18).

We don’t usually think of pragmatic lists as creative.  Yet they are composed of words and any use of words has a creative component.  Just think about placement, which Twain used for the marble.  In a pragmatic list, the first item holds the privileged spot.  First place may be anointed through an accident of the alphabet.  It might also be an example of what Belknap calls deliberate arrangement.  Even in alphabetical lists, first place can be deliberate.  Words have synonyms and some of those synonyms start with an A. 

Here's where we begin to see the connection between literary and pragmatic lists.  They both communicate.  The literary list communicates the author's intentions and, in many cases, so can the pragmatic list.  If you are the author of a pragmatic list, what are your intentions for the list?  What do you want to give your readers?  The answers will help you build a deliberate arrangement that intentionally communicates. ~                                                                                                     

     

Strategic Information Arrangement Returns to Simmons College in May

Strategic Information Arrangement: Theory and Techniques

Online CE Course at Simmons College in May, 2010 

Instructor:  Katherine Bertolucci

Fee:  $250 (Simmons GSLIS Alumni price $200) for the four week online course.

Registration:  http://www.simmons.edu/gslis/careers/continuing-education/workshops/online.php#strategic (Click "Register," top of the page on the left)

"Strategic Information Arrangement" takes an entertaining look at the building blocks of order, especially arrangement styles for organized information.  These are the skills you need to display information, whether in taxonomy, classification, or structured lists. Understanding these strategies helps you build ordered arrangements that persuade users. Lack of understanding can inadvertently send users in the opposite direction. Since all information has order, even if only random, each arrangement structure you build is an opportunity to persuade or to accidentally dissuade.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil believes "order is more profound than information" because it "fits a purpose." This course helps you develop profound order with fifteen list structures, six hierarchic methods, and five persuasive strategies. Katherine's client Snoopy is on hand to explain some of the concepts. Nevada’s Burning Man art festival and the Rolling Stones also make an appearance. You learn how each technique fits a unique purpose and how to persuasively exploit these techniques. 

For Memorial Day, we review the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme from World War I, each with similar information and goals, yet requiring different name arrangement strategies.  In the optional assignment, you design a hierarchic structure with provided material.  Assignments are critiqued by Katherine, the only organizational expert focusing on persuasive arrangement. 

Instructor: Katherine Bertolucci is an information management consultant and owner of Isis Information Services in Phoenix, AZ. She specializes in the development and arrangement of subject-based classifications, taxonomies, and other formats for persuasive information presentation. A pioneer in non-traditional classification, Katherine built her first taxonomy in 1978. Clients include poets and transnational corporations such as Procter & Gamble and Thomson Financial. Known for her work with Snoopy, Katherine's programs are entertaining and informative. She is former Chair of SLA's Library Management Division and Information Futurists Caucus. Katherine’s essays on information arrangement appear on IsisInBlog. Print publications include “The Future Still Awaits Us: Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity on Wall Street” (Searcher, July-August, 2009),"Beyond Findability: Organizing Information in the Age of the Miscellaneous" (Searcher, February, 2009), and "Happiness is Taxonomy: Four Structures for Snoopy" (Information Outlook, March, 2004). Contact her at katherine@isisinform.com

Photo Credit: "The Temple of Joy at Night," © Jim Hammer and Burning Man. More photos by Jim Hammer at http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrscience

Names on a Memorial: The Wittenbergplatz Concentration Camps Sign

(Today is the anniversary of the 1978 assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk at the hands of fellow Supervisor Dan White.  It happened nine days after the Jonestown massacre and the assassination of Leo Ryan, a Bay Area Congressional Representative.  Jim Jones himself was well connected in the San Francisco political scene.  At the time, I was working in Davis, east of San Francisco near Sacramento.  I remember clearly Dianne Feinstein’s announcement of the assassinations as she became Mayor of the city.)

In my ongoing research on the arrangement of names on memorials, I am reading an excellent book by James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning.  It won the Jewish Book Council’s National Book Award in the Holocaust category.   I highly recommend this to anyone interested in the nature of monuments and memorials.

On p. 54, Young shows a photo and describes a memorial at the Wittenbergplatz transit station in Berlin.  A simple sign listing the names of ten concentration camps, it begins with the phrase “Places of terror that we should never forget.”  Young writes that the camps “are in no special order, other than that the German camps are listed last.” 

As an arrangement expert, I realized listing the German camps last indicates someone thought about the order of the names.  People who like to organize tend to take another step, if only for their own benefit.  So I used Wikipedia to find a pattern, building a spreadsheet of categories that might be organizing criteria, including locations, dates of operation, numbers of prisoners, and numbers of deaths.  I discovered the camps are listed in a complex order that adds meaning to our understanding of the memorial and of the Holocaust.    

Camp	Country	Established	Number of Prisoners	Deaths
Auschwitz	Poland	1940	400,000	1,100,000
Stutthof	Poland	1939	110,000	65,000
Maidanek	Poland	1941	Extermination camp	78,000
Treblinka	Poland	1942	Extermination camp	870,000
Theresienstadt	Czechoslovakia	1941	140,000	35,000
Buchenwald	Germany	1937	250,000	56,000
Dachau	Germany	1933	200,000	31,591
Sachsenhausen	Germany	1936	100,000	200,000
Ravensbruck	Germany	1939	150,000	90,000
Bergen-Belsen	Germany	1943	70,000	100,000

(Data from Wikipedia’s List of Nazi-German Concentration Camps.  The number of deaths at Bergen-Belsen is not included in the Wikipedia table, but is estimated from the first paragraph in the Wikipedia article on Bergen-Belsen.)

The first four camps in the arrangement are located in Poland.  The fifth, Theresienstadt, is in Czechoslovakia, with the rest in Germany.  In Poland and in Germany, the first camp is the largest.  The remaining camps in the two countries are then listed by the date the camp was established. 

There may be several reasons for placing Poland first and Germany last.  Auschwitz is by far the largest camp, with the largest number of deaths, so placing it first in the full list is appropriate.  In addition, Germany is the host of the sign and perpetrator of the Holocaust, so the sign designers placed themselves last.  Therefore Theresienstadt, the sole Czech camp, is in the middle. 

Why did the designers combine size and date as an arrangement?  If they wanted the largest camp first, why not list the rest in order by size?  I believe they wanted to avoid a hierarchy of horror.  Treblinka, which only had enough space to kill people, was not more benign because it was smaller.  Another option that would place Auschwitz first is alphabetical order.  But alphabetical order has no meaning.  Auschwitz is not first because it starts with an A.  It is first because it is the largest place of terror.

This arrangement is so complex, with three different placement strategies, that an honored Holocaust scholar did not see it.  What is the purpose of something so obscure?  Should the designers put a paragraph on the back of the sign explaining their intentions? 

Memorials, even simple signs, are a form of art.  We don’t usually explain art on the piece itself.  We let viewers discover their own understanding.  Like most artists, the sign designers offered clues.  They placed Auschwitz, which begins with an A, first in a non-alphabetic arrangement.  They also set apart the three countries.  This sign is intended for Germans who would know the five camps in their own country.  The clues tell us there is some sort of arrangement here.  Young recognized this when he commented that the German camps were last. 

The Wittenbergplatz sign is at a transit station in a busy Berlin shopping area.  There may be thousands of commuters who see it every day.  If the sign were in alphabetical order, it would be stagnant.  Instead it has a structure that is implied but not obvious, an enigma perhaps adding more conscious thought to those thousands who every day see the words, “Places of terror that we should never forget.”             

 

Names on a Memorial: Meaningful Adjacencies

(This post acknowledges October 12 as a day honoring Christopher Columbus, who promoted European colonization of the New World, thus beginning the desecration of North and South America’s original civilizations.)

Michael Arad, designer of the World Trade Center 9/11 memorial, originally envisioned a random name arrangement.  He felt the imposition of any organized arrangement strategy would cause “grief and anguish.”  However, it soon became clear that it was the randomization of the names that was causing the grief and anguish.    

Families of those who died understood that random trivializes life and death.  They wanted the name arrangement to indicate affiliation, such as business, friends and family, along with details including the names of the businesses, ages of the victims, and floor numbers.  Family groups fought for this vision by refusing to donate to the memorial, demonstrating the emotional power of information arrangement.  The designers compromised with a name arrangement that is intended to look random but is actually a highly organized list of names with “meaningful adjacencies.”  This is not a simple structure with one set of arrangement rules.  Each name is placed according to individualized criteria.      

Both the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) and the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme incorporate meaningful adjacencies, as does every arrangement method, except random.  A lack of meaningful adjacencies defines random.  The VVM lists names in chronological order.  Those who died on a given date are adjacent on the memorial.  Military survivors can find friends by finding their own time of service at a designated place on The Wall. 

In France, the Somme memorial from World War I achieves the same goal with a different strategy.  Most of the 72,000 names listed on that memorial went missing on the same day, so chronology has no meaning.  These names are listed by military units, bringing people together because of recruitment by towns.  British military units in World War I often consisted of men from a single area, a method that has since been abandoned.  Whole units died during the surge on July 1, 1916.  Today, people from these towns can find their missing generation of young men in one place on the massive walls.   

These two arrangements are brilliant in their simplicity, but they organize groups whose members have similar defining characteristics.  That is not the case with the World Trade Center memorial.  People who died on September 11, 2001 were working or they were visiting a building, flying in an airplane or trying to rescue others.  They were with their co-workers, perhaps with their families, or they were alone.  They did not have a common reason for being where they died.       

When the arrangement controversy was raging, I submitted a proposal for a geographic structure and that is essentially what is being used.  It should be noted that I have no evidence that anyone read my proposal.  Arrangement by location was always an obvious option for this memorial.  My suggestion was based solidly on location to the point of listing people on airplanes by their seat assignments.  People who know each other sit next to each other, so meaningful adjacency is achieved.  I also wanted the names from the towers listed by floor.  Again, people on the same floor know each other.  This method added meaning by demonstrating that most people below a certain floor escaped and most above a certain floor did not.  To my mind, a full geographic arrangement illustrates the tragedy more completely by showing where people were and who they were with when they died. 

The selected memorial design and its name arrangement include panels in two squares that surround two pools, one for each tower and the airplane that crashed into it.  The Pentagon and its airplane, the First Responders, and Flight 93 are with the South Tower.  Those who died in the 1993 attack are with the North Tower. 

In all, there are nine groups.  The title of each group is inscribed at the beginning of its associated names.  For example, “World Trade Center” appears before the names of those who died in the North or South Tower.  The names are then arranged by affiliation, which is not indicated, except for the First Responder agencies and units, who are reprieved of the need to look random.     

In general the families were not happy with this compromise.  They wanted more information next to each name, specifically age, company and floor.  My proposal would resolve company and floor, and also included ages with each name.  I want to say that the struggle here shows the folly of allowing non-organizers to develop such an important name arrangement.  People who don’t understand the impact of organized information thought up random.  But there are other factors to consider here.  Does every business want the kind of advertising that comes with being part of a tragedy?   

Once random was abandoned, the designers encouraged individual participation.  Next-of-kin could request placement near another name, a friend in the same company perhaps, or a loved one who worked for a different business.  Companies could request that names be arranged by department or work unit.  This resulting structure is therefore a puzzle for the designers to solve.  We can assume there were trade-offs. 

The names of a married couple who worked for different companies are listed together.  The couple has three affiliations – to each other and to their separate companies.  This could be resolved by taking the married couple out of their respective companies and placing them separately or by putting their two companies next to each other.  But this couple may not be the only ones in their companies with cross-corporate affiliations.  The designers were careful to hedge their promises with phrases like “to the best of our abilities.”  They understood subjective decisions would have to be made.  For example, if there has to be a choice, is it more important to put a married couple together than two best friends? 

My fully location based arrangement eliminated subjectivity.  However, the married couple would not be together forever on the memorial.  Their names would be sitting in their separate offices.  The chosen arrangement is a compromise with many mistakes, pretending to be random being especially egregious.  But individual attention to the placement of each name is a new idea in memorial name arrangement.  It came about accidentally when the families refused to let the designers abandon their responsibility to those who died.  The families didn’t get everything they wanted, but what they did get was personalized attention for each name engraved at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.

(This post is part of a series about how names are arranged on memorial structures.  I returned to the series when I prepared an online course on Strategic Information Arrangement for Simmons College.  Other posts in the series can be found in the IsisInBlog Directory under “Names on a Memorial Series.)

Strategic Information Arrangement: Theory and Techniques

CE Course at Simmons College in October, 2009. 

Instructor:  Katherine Bertolucci

More Information and Registration:  http://www.simmons.edu/gslis/careers/continuing-education/workshops/online.php#strategic

 

Edward Lutyens' Memorial to the Missing of the Somme in Thiepval, France honors 72,000 British Commonwealth soldiers missing from the Battle of the Somme in WWI.  This memorial influenced Maya Lin's design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.  Both have the goal of keeping comrades together.  Because the two wars were so different, they each use unique arrangements to achieve the same goal.  (Photo:  Commonwealth War Graves Commission) 

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This four week course looks at arrangement methods and persuasive strategies that help you organize information to promote your goals.  Included is a unit on the arrangement of names at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme from WWI.  The course also features Snoopy, the Rolling Stones, and the Burning Man festival in Nevada to show you how to successfully and persuasively arrange information.   

Audience:  Librarians and anyone else who organizes information.  Many supervisors believe all librarians know exactly how to organize everything.  They are often chosen for an arrangement project even if their specialty is search rather than classification.  This course will help you meet that expectation.     

Purpose: Students learn the basic methods of organizing information.  They also learn persuasive strategies that complement an organizational structure.    

Format:  The online four week course uses weekly PowerPoint slides with textual notes, and optional readings.  There is an optional online discussion each week and an optional final project of organizing a list of titles in an entertaining topic.   

Hours to complete: That depends on the student.  The PowerPoint slide shows are relatively short, with notes written in an entertaining style.  Students can read as many or as few of the resources as they want.  Most of the additional readings are essays about information organization from Katherine’s blog, IsisInBlog.  Optional online discussions are one hour each week.  Timing for the optional final project again depends on the student, most likely a few hours.    

The instructor will provide feedback on the readings during the weekly online discussions.  Final projects also receive extensive feedback.   

More Information and Registration:  http://www.simmons.edu/gslis/careers/continuing-education/workshops/online.php#strategic

 

"The Future Still Awaits Us" Published in Searcher

My newest print article, “The Future Still Awaits Us:  Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity on Wall Street,” is published in the July-August 2009 issue of Searcher.  There’s a very attractive robot on the cover.

 

The article looks at the concept of the Singularity, which in this context surmises that machines will overtake human intelligence, with an effect so profound we cannot even imagine what life will be like after the event.  I suggest that automated financial trading, which contributed to the current economic crisis, may be a sign that the Singularity is approaching.

 

In his 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil predicted events in 2009, 2019, 2029 and 2099, with a chapter for each year and also in a time line format.  In a sidebar to my article, I look at all of the 2009 Time Line predictions and evaluate their accuracy.  In addition, I have categorized his predictions for the four years so readers can easily see Kurzweil’s evolving vision.  I believe this is to date the most thorough published analysis of Kurzweil’s 2009 Time Line predictions.

 

Another sidebar discusses environmental or horizon scanning as a futurist technique well suited to librarians.  The article includes further resources and a reference list.