IsisInBlog

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. ~                                                                                                     

     

All Things Being Equal: Sorting Articles in One Issue of a Journal

My university and public libraries both offer the E-Journal Portal service.  Enter the name of a journal and the portal shows which databases deliver full-text articles in that journal.  Each database responds to this type of search with its own display personality. The differences in their presentations have implications for intellectual honesty that demonstrate once again the necessity of organizing information with an understanding of subject parameters.      

ProQuest does this type of search best by offering a journal title drilldown, which first presents a journal page with available issues listed in reverse chronological order. Clicking a date retrieves all articles in a single issue.  Two sorting options are offered.  The default is alphabetical by article title.  A page number sort replicates the table of contents.  ProQuest’s search screen provides a different user experience.  That list of retrieved titles sorts by “most recent first” (default) or by relevance.  In the journal title drilldown, those two sorts have no value because all articles have the same date and equal relevance.  Thus ProQuest provides different sorting capabilities for the two techniques.

            Gale’s Academic OneFILE offers journal title drilldown with no sorting capabilities.  It opens with the journal page and a list of available years.  Each year expands to display its issues in reverse chronological order.  The resulting titles display in page number order, but that is not the indicated sort.  The only listed sort option is publication date, which is actually the search criterion.  With the search screen technique, relevance is added to date as a sort option.  By eliminating the relevance sort from journal title drilldown, Academic OneFile acknowledges that relevance has no value for a list of titles from a single issue, but it offers no realistic sort capabilities.  Instead results are delivered pre-sorted by page number, with the sort indicated as publication date.           

EBSCO’s journal title drilldown is similar to Academic OneFile with the first page offering a list of years that expands into issues in reverse chronological order.  However in its sorting options, EBSCO acknowledges no difference between the journal title drilldown and search screen techniques.  Its Business Source Elite and MasterFILE Premier both allow sorting by date, source and relevance for results retrieved with journal title drilldown or from the search screen.  All three sorts are useless in a list of titles from the same issue of the same journal.  Selecting any of these sorts in journal title drilldown returns a list of titles in page number order, which like Academic OneFile, is not offered as a sort option.  Business Source Elite at the academic library offers a fourth option, a valuable author sort, but the public library’s MasterFILE Premier eliminates that advantage.

OCLC’s WilsonSelectPlus does not offer journal title drilldown.  Users of E-Journal Portal are simply taken to an empty search screen.  Those who want the drilldown must try a different database.  If they stick with WilsonSelectPlus, they are rewarded with advanced sorting capabilities, but not with a one-click list of articles in a single issue. 

Both ProQuest and WilsonSelectPlus maintain their intellectual honesty in the entire process.  ProQuest offers a separate journal title drilldown with distinct sort capabilities, thus recognizing that these results have different organizational parameters than the results from a search screen.  WilsonSelectPlus does not offer journal title drilldown.  While that is disappointing, the database is honest about its capabilities.  Academic OneFile is halfway there.  It does not offer relevance sorting for a list of titles from the same issue, instead it labels a page number sort as date.  EBSCO recognizes no difference between results obtained by journal title drill down and the search screen, providing a surreal user experience as the three sorting mechanisms of date, source and relevance all return titles in page number order.        

“Beyond Findability” Published in Searcher

My latest print article, “Beyond Findability: Organizing Information in the Age of the Miscellaneous,” is now available in the February 2009 issue of Searcher. 

In addition to discussing logic discrepancies in David Weinberger’s book Everything Is Miscellaneous, the article addresses the value of arranged information for reasons other than findability.  The organizing process itself often leads to new knowledge.  Like any form of communication, organized information expresses a knowledge perspective.  The presentation of that perspective can be a valuable service to users.  Physical arrangements of organized information are often symmetrical, perhaps neurologically enhancing knowledge acquisition.  The article opens with a description of Michael Wesch’s video, Information R/evolution,” which implies that libraries still use typewriters.

Subsequent to publishing the article, I discovered I am not the only one thinking “Beyond Findability.”  On October 31, Jonathan Young published “Beyond Findability: The Search for Active Intelligence” on ZDNet News.  Young is a Senior Research Engineer at Attivio.  His article is about the future of search engines, “As we move beyond the search box (the ‘user interface of last resort’), enterprise search solutions are beginning to support many different search modalities, including exploratory search, information discovery, and information synthesis.”

On March 18, “Beyond Findability: Reframing IA Practice & Strategy for Turbulent Times” will be a pre-conference workshop at the ASIST Information Architecture Summit.  The workshop is sponsored by the Information Architecture Institute with co-presenters Andrew Hinton, Livia Labate, Joe Lamantia and Matthew Milan,.  They will be discussing the future of information architecture and user design, looking at “new, emerging ideas that have shown promise ‘in the wild’ of design practice.” 

Michael Wesch will be a keynote speaker at the Summit, so we’ve got a circle going here.  This year the Summit is at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, a great venue.  If you attend, be sure to check out the ducks.

Persuasion by Arrangement: Intended and Unintended Consequences

Arrangement persuades every day.  Lots of us pop into the grocery store for a bottle of milk.  So why is milk always at the back of the store?  That arrangement persuades us to hike through aisles of food that we only just now realize we need.  Got cookies?

The arrangement of concepts also persuades.  At the simplest level, alphabetical order implies equality and chronology implies time.  An intentional arrangement considers the needs of both user and designer to influence effective use of information.  An unintentional arrangement risks influencing users in unintended ways.

In his book Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do, B. J. Fogg defines persuasion as “an attempt to change attitudes or behaviors or both” (p. 15).  By placing milk at the back of the store, the grocer attempts to influence buying behavior.  In the arrangement of concepts, I expand Fogg’s definition to include persuasion as reflecting a point of view.  If I use alphabetical order, I may persuade you that each item has equal value, at least in terms of the list.

Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial demonstrates one of the most elegant examples of persuasive arrangement.  She organized names on The Wall by date of injury, not date of death.  A soldier who died later of wounds inflicted in battle is therefore listed on the date of the battle.  His name is in alphabetical order with others who died on that day, so he is included among his buddies.  The survivors of the battle can visit The Wall and, in one section, see the names of their comrades.  This intentional arrangement persuades survivors and tourists alike to consider the fellowship of fallen soldiers.  It is one reason The Wall inspires more emotion than other memorial structures.

Maya Lin likes circles, so her chronology begins with a tall center panel and proceeds to the right as the panels descend in height.  It begins again at the farthest left of the panels, which grow to the tallest center point and the final names.  The name at the farthest right is Jessie C. Alba.  The others who died on his day are at the farthest left.

This may be an example of an unintentional arrangement decision with unintended consequences.  A theme of The Wall is comradeship among those who died together and among their friends who survived.  Because it is primarily an intentional arrangement, it obeys its own rules. Each name follows the previous name.  Last names beginning with an A signal a new day.  It is this rule that places Jessie C. Alba at the farthest end.  The others on his day are at the opposite end of The Wall, separated by 138 panels.  This separation implies the loneliness of death, which is the antithesis of The Wall’s theme of comradeship.

In the design process, it would have been a simple adjustment to move Alba’s name one place over to the farthest left panel, with the others on his day.  We do not know if that was contemplated.  The Wall is a work of art.  Each detail allows us to ponder its meaning.  Dying on a battlefield is a lonely experience, even if you are surrounded by your comrades.  But that is the opposite message from the other details on the Wall, which purposefully gather together those who died and the visitors who survived.  Intentional or not, in this one detail for Jessie C. Alba, the rules were more important than the theme.

Native Americans place one error in their artwork because only God can be perfect.  It is an intended error with an intended consequence.  Arrangement errors that go unrecognized have unintended consequences, possibly negative consequences that may defeat mission goals until the error is discovered.  Information arrangement is part of an entire message.  Take as much care with its details as you would with any other communication.

Stealth Organizing

With evacuees arriving at the Phoenix airport, a local radio station announced Katrina Donation Day.  I was looking for a way to help and it was easy enough to pack a box of clothes for the New Orleans refugees.  To give a little extra, I joined the bucket brigade in the station parking lot and helped load the truck – lots of clothing, also toys, baby stuff, toiletries, hygiene items.  The hygiene woke me up, a box filled with necessities that have been in my bathroom cabinet since childhood.  That’s when I realized the enormity of losing everything and I knew I could make a difference in the rescue.      

 

I’m an organizer.  I usually organize ideas, but I can organize stuff.  The hurricane rescue effort in Phoenix was receiving massive amounts of donated items.  They could probably use some organizing expertise.  I started phoning the next day and was put on waiting lists.  To be effective, I had to get started soon.  Organizing initiatives work best when they happen at the beginning of a project.  So I kept calling.  Eventually someone understood the value of my offer.  At Salvation Army headquarters, they gave me a badge and sent me to evacuee housing.  It was now Monday afternoon, Labor Day, 2005.

 

The strategy was for evacuees to tell caseworkers what clothing they needed.  The caseworkers then searched for the right sizes in a free store arranged like a thrift store, with clothing divided by major categories, but not by size.  When I arrived, volunteers were emptying large warehouse boxes and hanging clothes on sales racks.  I positioned myself in their area for a full view of the entire operation and started sorting.  One of the volunteers, The Boss, came over to give me instructions, which I followed as I continued to survey the situation.

 

One key to a successful organizing project is finding a component with high return on investment (ROI).  The investment is the organizing expense, in this case, time and energy.  For my purposes, hanging up clothes had a low ROI because inconsistent size labeling forced a careful examination of each item.  The clothing in these categories was also few enough to be eyeballed by a caseworker.  I started looking for a fast win, an easy to organize section where caseworker frustration was high.  They were pawing through jumbled heaps of underwear and mounds of shoes trying to find sizes.  Underwear would be a huge project, but at least it was divided by sex.  Not so for shoes, which was also a more manageable quantity.  That’s where I started, working into the evening dividing shoes by sex and size.

 

The next morning I established authority by arriving early with supplies from home – blank paper, marking pens and tape.  The first task was labeling the now organized shoes.  When The Boss showed up around mid-morning and saw me already there, she knew I wouldn’t be following her instructions anymore.  About the time I finished the shoes, a large shipment of khaki pants arrived, neatly folded and stapled with conforming labels.  Big ROI there.  Evacuees were requesting work clothes for job interviews.  I located some unused tables, set up a staging area, and sorted pants like a deck of cards.  The thrift store was now beginning to feel like a shopping mall jeans store. Caseworkers just walked up to the correct size and took what they needed.

 

Returning from a break, I found my staging area commandeered for a thrift store category.  The Boss gave me a significant look, but she had not undone the organized khakis.  I wasn’t there for territorial skirmishes, so I walked over to the intimidating pile of women’s underwear.  Caseworkers, getting accustomed to efficiency, were complaining about sizes.  The first sort separated panties from socks.  That required finding empty boxes, refilling the boxes, and maneuvering them within a small space.  By the time everything was prepped, it was already evening.  Size sorting would begin tomorrow.

 

I arrived early again, but this day The Boss didn’t show and the organizing effort really got established.  After taping size labels to the wall, I began sorting the women’s underwear.  I got into the zone, the organizing zone.  It took all day, with caseworkers searching the collection as I worked.  At one point, I turned around and saw a guy organizing the men’s underwear.  About an hour later a group of new volunteers came up to me and asked what they could do to help.  I showed them the women’s socks.  When I finished the panties in the late afternoon, I took another visual survey.  All volunteers were organizing.  Caseworkers were finding what they needed without assistance.  Size labels on the wall displayed the organized nature of this facility.  In two and a half days, I turned a thrift store into a distribution center.  I did it without disrupting the rescue effort or even requesting assistance. 

Categorical Emotion

Am currently reading Brave New World. I arrived at Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel first by thinking about the promotional spins we get so often from Web promoters. That led to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four Newspeak. When you think about Orwell you tend to think about Huxley. I’m only a few chapters in, but the novel addresses a question I have had for a long time concerning our emotional response to categorizing.

Why do some people hate categories? After all, we categorize all the time. We filter every sight we see through categories. Walk down a street and you categorize objects as houses, trees, people. It’s an unconscious act that allows us to navigate our daily lives. This is a road; I can walk on it. This is a door; it is a subcategory of house and I can open it. Almost every minute of our day is spent with categories, whether conscious or not. We even dream in categories. Yet the terms class, category and hierarchy are often expressed as pejoratives. Why is such a natural act as classifying so often vilified? I believe it is because these terms also express power relationships that control human beings.

Life in Huxley’s new world features the extreme categorization of humans. All babies are essentially cloned. At their mechanical conception, each group of clones is designated as a class, Alphas on top and Epsilon-Minus Semi Morons on the bottom. Embryos of lower classes receive less oxygen. How are you feeling about the word class right now? We don’t like to classify human beings.

Other classifications simply organize concepts. Animal taxonomy expresses one way of arranging biological characteristics into precise definitions. Canines have no power over dogs. Dogs are simply a type of canine, along with wolves and coyotes. One canine is no more important than the other. They share certain biological characteristics so we place them near each other in a class. We name their class canine and call the whole thing a hierarchy.

In an org chart, a CEO does have power over a manager and we use the same word to express that power. Hierarchy has two meanings, one for placement based on characteristics and one for power. Like Huxley’s new world, we first experience a power hierarchy in infancy. Consider the org chart of a family. Hierarchy can be benign or ominous, but ominous always lurks in the background, even though when we open a door we are glad to know it is part of the hierarchy of a house. It tells us where we are going.   

Names on a Memorial: Oklahoma City

(This posting was originally intended for publication during the 12th anniversary week of the Oklahoma City bombing. That week also saw Yom HaShoa [Holocaust Martyrs' Remembrance Day] and the anniversaries of the Columbine High School massacre and the Branch Davidian fire. Next year, this same week will be the first anniversary of the shootings at Virginia Tech. This year, at the end of the week, I found renewal at a concert for the 38th Earth Day.

My posting therefore acknowledges another memorial, one without names, The Man with Two Hats, which honors the Canadian role in the liberation of the Netherlands during World War Two. Henk Visch's statue of a man with arms upraised, holding a hat in each hand, is located in both Ottawa and Apeldoorn and was first dedicated in the Netherlands on May 2, 2000.

At the Ottawa dedication on May 11, 2002, the Canadian Minister of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Rey D. Pagtakhan, a Philippine immigrant, commented that these statues would demonstrate "the true test of friendship -- of one country to another." Every year since liberation, Holland shows its gratitude with a gift to Canada of 10,000 tulip bulbs.)

The Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, yielded to pressure from the 9/11 families and announced a new arrangement of names for the World Trade Center Memorial. Random is out and affiliation is in. Almost. All names are to be listed with others in their affiliation. While rescue workers' unit affiliations will be fully expressed, corporate affiliations will not. Even American Airlines and United Airlines are excluded. Only flight numbers will be on the Memorial. Not surprisingly, the families remain unsatisfied. They want ages, floor numbers and corporate names.

The Oklahoma City National Memorial, designed by Hans and Torrey Butzer with Sven Berg, symbolically achieves all of that. The names of those who died on April 19, 1995 are engraved onto chairs sitting in the footprint of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The arrangement is geographic, with nine rows of chairs symbolizing the nine story building. Names are located on the floor they were on when they died, divided by agency, left to right, replicating the location of offices in the building. Names of employees and visitors are alphabetical within agency.

Five people died outside the Murrah Building. In alphabetical order, they are listed singly in a vertical line of chairs at the end of every other floor. The name on the first floor is Rebecca Anderson, a rescuer. Then one name from the Water Resources Building, two names from the Athenian Building and another from Water Resources.

Abandoning the geographic arrangement, alphabetical order for the non-Murrah names separates the two Water Resources employees. But if those names were arranged by building, where would that leave Rebecca Anderson? She didn't have a building. She walked into the ruin and died when part of the Murrah Building fell on her. In this case, selecting alphabetical order puts the rescuer in the first position.

A solution for the non-Murrah names would be to organize them by building, with the person not associated with a building at first or last. Rebecca died entering the ruin where the first floor had been. So placing her name first makes sense. This fulfils the geographic theme of the arrangement, keeps the names in each of the exterior buildings together, and still places the rescuer in the honored position on the first floor.

The designers made another organizational decision that is somewhat bizarre. Four married couples died at the Social Services Administration (SSA) on the first floor. Each couple followed the tradition of sharing the same last name. For them, alphabetical order was ignored to place the husband's name first. Research indicates the purpose was to keep the tradition implied by "husband and wife" or "Mr. and Mrs." The alphabet has a tradition too, so it seems an odd choice to make in the first year of the 21st Century, when the Memorial was dedicated.

If I were to change alphabetical order, I would place three children with their grandparents. Peachlyn Bradley, three years old, and her brother Gabreon Bruce, three months old, died at the SSA with their grandmother Cheryl Hammon. The accident of alphabetical order places Peachlyn and Gabreon together, but seven chairs separate them from Cheryl. LaRue and Luther Treaner died with their four year old granddaughter Ashley Eckles. They are now separated by 21 chairs.

Since the designers were open to changing the alphabet, each trio could have remained together, Cheryl surrounded by her grandchildren and Ashley by her grandparents. Theirs were the two families that lost three people. Keeping these loved ones together on the Memorial would have been a small, but perhaps meaningful gift.

For the World Trade Center (WTC), adding floor numbers to the names would help demonstrate that the highest numbers of deaths occurred above the point of impact in both buildings. The Oklahoma City Memorial geographically shows the location of the greatest number of deaths by arranging the names into a concentration of chairs, with more chairs in the middle and fewer chairs toward the right and left edges.

The bomb exploded directly under the cribs in America's Kids Child Development Center on the second floor. The most remembered image of that day is a fireman carrying the limp body of a baby. This bombing killed a lot of babies. The Memorial acknowledges their deaths by giving children smaller chairs.

It's an elegant arrangement, with just a couple of misses. Using only names and chairs, the designers showed affiliation, age, level of destruction, and location of death by floor, office and exterior to the Murrah Building.

They did one more thing. The Memorial's Survival Wall lists the names of more than 800 who experienced and survived the blast. They did not die, but they certainly had a life-changing experience. Offering them a part of the Memorial honors their suffering, gives them a place for contemplation, and helps visitors understand the enormity of the crime.

Survivors' names are alphabetized within the buildings, which are also in alphabetical order. The original plan was to arrange the building names geographically, but it was felt that the primary target needed to be first.  Alphabetical order places the Alfred P. Murrah Building at the front of the list. (Linenthal, 2001)

I wish the World Trade Center Memorial would consider honoring the survivors of 9/11. I am not suggesting the names of everyone in the WTC on September 11, 2001 be listed. That is probably impossible to know. However, the names of companies with offices in the WTC could be engraved onto the Memorial, giving thousands of people with horrific experiences a place of solace and a place for their own memories. For reasons that have not been explained, corporate names are disallowed and the World Trade Center Memorial continues to miss the opportunity to fully serve its community of 9/11 survivors and families.

(I am grateful to Brad Robison, Director of the Terrorism Information Center at the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Oklahoma City. I contacted Brad during the anniversary week and appreciate his taking the time to answer my questions.)

Names on a Memorial: Jessie C. Alba

(Today’s post honors Charlotte Winters, the last female U.S. veteran of World War I, who died last week at the age of 109.)

Reading the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) from left to right, like a book, Jessie C. Alba is the last name on the memorial. Because the names are listed in chronological order of casualty, visitors often think he was the last to die, but the VVM is not intended to be read like a book. 

It is intended to be experienced as a circle, with the names beginning at the center vertex and continuing east. The first half ends with Jessie, who died on May 25, 1968. Visitors then must traverse the full length of the Wall to the far west panel for the next May 25^th name, John H. Anderson. The names then proceed in chronological order, alphabetical within each date, back to the center vertex, completing the circle.

The first name for July 8, 1959, and therefore the first name at the top of Panel IE in the center vertex, is Dale R. Buis. He was watching a movie with his unit when a sniper attacked. The final names, from May 15, 1975, are on Panel 1W, one panel to the west of 1E. These eighteen died during the rescue of the S. S. Mayaguez and its crew. Richard Vandegeer is the last name on the Wall, not Jessie C. Alba.

Many first time visitors don’t get the circle metaphor, which I believe is the weakest element of the Wall. The entrance to the VVM is not in the center, but at the west or east for a linear, not a circular experience. Rather than a meaningful symbol, the circle seems like a quirk of this memorial. I’m not complaining. Who knows what details allowed a 21 year old college student to win the VVM competition and to overcome the extreme controversy of her design? This was Maya Lin’s first major work. Some of her subsequent pieces also include circles. If she wants the beginning and the end in the middle, that’s her prerogative as the artist.

But it leaves the problem of Jessie C. Alba. Rather than the last to die, Jessie is the first name of those who died on May 25, 1968. A Texan, Sergeant Alba belonged to the Army’s 101^st Airborne Division, Delta Company.  He died on the ground in Thua Thien-Hue at age 20. His is the last name on the last panel to the east, Panel 70E. The other 88 names for May 25^th begin 140 panels to the west on Panel 70W.

One of the advantages of the chronology is the listing together of all names who died in a battle on a given day. I discussed this feature of the Wall in my 1/15/07 post, “Comrades in Vietnam and the Somme.” The arrangement design allows survivors of a battle to visit one area of the Wall, find their comrades and relive the experience. The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme achieves the same goal by listing regiments together. In that arrangement, the flow for three regiments is disrupted to promote Edwin Lutyens’ architecture (see my 2/4/07 post, A Path Among the Missing).

Rather than promoting architecture, I believe the Wall got caught up in its own rules -- chronological order, alphabetical order within dates and no space to indicate a new date. But the VVM also has rules for keeping comrades together. Those who died of injuries are listed with the date of injury not the date of death. The missing are listed with the day they went missing. Because the first rules were slavishly followed, the intention of the second rules was lost for Jessie.

An information arrangement is built by rules – the rule of the alphabet, the rule of chronology, or something more complex. Information arrangers often get caught up in their own rules, forgetting they were created to serve a goal. When a rule becomes more important than the goal, it’s time to rethink the rules. Here’s another rule for the Wall. If one name is left hanging at the end of 70E, it can be moved to the top of 70W.

As it happens, Jessie was the only one in his unit to die on May 25, 1968. The nearest chronological deaths for Delta Company are Elroy E. Beier, May 5, 1968, on Panel 55E and Nickolas G. Garcia, April 22, 1969 on Panel 26W. Alba and Beier arrived in Vietnam on the same day, December 14, 1967. Garcia arrived on April 27, 1968, a month before Jessie died, eight days before Elroy died.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter that Jessie is all by himself on that farthest panel. His buddies probably don’t know anyone else who died on May 25, 1968. But now Jessie belongs to another group. He belongs to the group who died on that day and it does matter that he is separated by 140 panels from the other members of his group. It matters to his fiancé, Mary Ann Lopez, who wrote on the The Wall-USA, “In 1996 I got a chance to see the Vietnam wall with his name on it and since I got there at night time it was so overwhelming for me. The wall is so huge and very scary in a way. I finally found his name and how ironic it was that his name is the last one almost all by itself at the end.”