Now

Occasional updates on what I’m thinking about and working on

As I’ve transitioned off all social media (except for LinkedIn, I guess, but I can’t imagine hanging out there), my goal is for this to provide general updates on a longer time scale.

November 2024

I guess everybody’s on BlueSky now, so I am too. I had set up the accounts months ago, but not really started looking at it, but the impetus to delete everything from my old Twitter account prompted me to open it up again. I’m still deciding to what extent social media is something that I want in my life, since stopping completely about a year ago. I do miss the conversation around IA that I used to get to eavesdrop on, and I’m wondering if that will resuscitate itself.

I pitched a talk on manuscript culture for the IA Conference. The basic idea is that there’s a story we often tell ourselves, where, for time immemorial, we wrote stuff down on paper, and it stayed there and it was fine. It only really got to be a problem when there was too much of it. Then, around 1990, we started putting stuff on the internet and everything went all to hell, in an unprecedented way. After reading a bunch about the history of books, reading, and writing, I think that this story is not strictly true. The truer story seems to be: For time immemorial, we wrote stuff down, and it was personal, idiosyncratic, and messy. The few people who wanted books made them in the ways that pleased them, without bothering with consistency. Then, around 1450, the physical and economic realities of mechanized printing lead books to become much more common and much more standardized. Until about 1990, you put information in print and it mostly stayed there. Then, we started putting everything on the internet and it’s all a mess again.

I think it frames our current moment differently to think that we are on the other side of a brief, ahistorical moment of stability, rather than an unprecedented disaster. There were huge benefits to manuscript culture that we lost with the transition to print. As I’m being asked what product strategy looks like in a world where generative AI capabilities make more things possible, I think it’s satisfying to realize that we haven’t yet recaptured what was good about a world where text was more fluid. There’s still cooler stuff to be built.

October 2024

The college I attended is doing an alumni book club, which I’m really enjoying. Our first book was The Epic of Gilgamesh, which I’d never read before, and it has me digging into research about cuneiform tablets and Ashburnipal’s Library at Nineveh. I had no idea, despite reading about it in grad school, that clay tablets lasted as an information technology for 3,000 years, being functionally stable for 2,000 of those, and also largely overlapping with papyrus scrolls (which did seem to have eventually supplanted them, but what a run.)

Like almost every other ancient text, Gilgamesh is incomplete. Unlike pretty much every other ancient text, scholars are sure we’ll eventually find all of it. This shocked me, because we don’t see that kind of certainty about Sophocles’ lost plays or the rest of Sappho, or even Love’s Labour’s Won, all of which are much more recent. Apparently clay tablets are so durable and laid so undisturbed, that we have tens of thousands of them (one source I found says half a million), largely undeciphered, and scholars are confident that the rest of Gilgamesh is in there, waiting to be found.

April 2024

I attended the IA Conference last week, and it was invigorating and inspiring. I gave my talk on IA as Domain-Driven Design. It was a great conference and reinvigorated my love for both information architecture and this community.

February 2024

I taught an undergrad class on Information Architecture for the first time last Fall, which absorbed all my extra energy, but was hugely fun. Currently, my team is growing and I’m leaning on this thinking heavily for management. I’m also working a talk for the IA summit on Domain-driven design.

July 2023

My big personal project of the past month has been getting this version of the website up and my notes integrated. Because I had some specific ideas about what I wanted to happen with backlinks, I switched the site generator from Hugo to Jekyll, and had to learn a tiny bit of Ruby to make that work, which is more Ruby than I knew before. Also, it was my touching CSS for the first time in many years. It’s gotten impressively easier.

My notetaking system has been my longer-term project, and I’m happy with how it’s working for me, so it feels gratifying to be able to work with the garage door open like this.