Tableau Visualization: Pitchfork vs Genre

Organization Structure: Database Model

In a previous post, I discussed organizational schemes which I applied to a video store. It was a concept that we could easily wrap our heads around because we encounter it in our lives everyday and in so many contexts. As a quick review organization schemes are how content is logically grouped together by its characteristics such as dictionaries’ alphabetical organization scheme. It seems like organization schemes are the only thing needed to decide on how to group content however, organizational structure is just as important as it defines the type of relationship between content items and groups.

I had to read through the text and refer to my notes to really grasp this concept. Organization Structures include hierarchy, database model, hypertext, and social classification. Although each type of organizational structure is important, I will be examining the database model since this week’s work included finding and choosing a dataset which required me to look at a database.

Before diving deeper into the database model I will quickly review the other organization structures.

• The Hierarchy: The Top-Down Approach is ubiquitous in our lives as it greatly informs our understanding of the world. From family trees, royal linage, and political systems, the structure is pervasive lending to its ease of usbility and understandability.
• Hyper text is a highly nonlinear structure as it includes items and chunks of information and the links between them. It can form hypermedia systems that connect text, data, image, video, and audio chunks but is it complex and can cause much confusion. It is easy to get lost as it requires several “clicks” that will throw a user into a dark hole of links and pages. However, this structure would help with creative and interesting relationships that I could see in experimental media perhaps.
• Social Classification is primarily drive by user-generated content tagging or free tagging. It is highly collaborative with no set focus so very interesting opportunities arise. For example. the free tagging of Twitter draws attention to “trending” tags.

Now back to the database model, it is a collection of data arranged for ease and speed of search and retrieval. There are several models but the one I encountered while exploring datasets was a relational model which consists of a set of relations or tables with rows and columns. The separate table lend to ease of finding and retrieving data but it did not automatically put it in relation to the other tables.

Luckily, the metadata was accurate so that the tables could be combined and offer a dynamic link of the data. Once linked, I took my data into a spreadsheet, a tool I am much more familiar with, to auto generate alphabetical and numerical indexes. Advanced filtering and sorting of search results are also very useful and great tools that the database model offers.

Organization schemes are somewhat easier for me to understand and I see how hybrid versions can be utilized but I am interested in seeing how dynamic and hybrid organization structures on a site can be.