Category Archives: information organization
Rotational Diagrams: Organizing Information in Circles
In Reinventing the Wheel, writer, design critic, and Design Observer co-founder Jessica Helfand considers the rich history of rotational diagrams — the wheel as a visual metaphor and an interactive tool for representing and understanding information, predating print by thousands of years. … Continue reading
Why We Like Lists?
From Spiegel Interview with Umberto Eco Eco: At first, we think that a list is primitive and typical of very early cultures, which had no exact concept of the universe and were therefore limited to listing the characteristics they could name. But, … Continue reading
Timeline of Information Access and Sharing (Infographic)
Source: Coveo
Big Data in the Age of the Telegraph
Caitlin Rosenthal writes in “Big Data in the Age of the Telegraph,” McKinsey Quarterly, March 2013: “In 1854, Daniel McCallum took charge of the operations of the New York and Erie Railroad. With nearly 500 miles of track, it was one of … Continue reading
Cattle Logs from 1882 to 2012
After seeing a card catalogue in the Iowa State University library in 1882, Thomas B. Wales, the secretary of the Holstein-Friesian Association of America, applied the idea to the 40,000 animals in the Holstein-Friesian Herd Book. He estimated that the number … Continue reading
Birth of Botanical Classification, Taxonomy
Today in 1753, Carl Linnaeus published the first edition of his two volume work Species Plantarum, in which he used for the first time a consistent naming structure for plants and laid the basis for modern nomenclature. The classification employed in the work allowed easy … Continue reading
Back to the Future: Re-centralizing storage
IDC: “One of the major themes affecting the HDD forecast is the shift in demand for HDDs in client devices. While PCs will continue to represent the largest market for HDDs in terms of unit shipments, revenue derived from HDDs … Continue reading
Lost and Found: GeoCities
Good alerts us to The Deleted City, “a digital archaeology of the world wide web as it exploded into the 21st century.”
Spinning Disks
Fifty-five years ago today, IBM introduced the disk drive. In 1953, Arthur J. Critchlow, a young member of IBM’s advanced technologies research lab in San Jose, California, was assigned the task of finding a better information storage medium than punch-cards. … Continue reading
The Story of Information 