IA Isn't Newor: What would Samuel Pepys' website look like?

Being an ENTERTAINING and INFORMATIVE look at a SINGULAR person ofNEAR ANTIQUITY, in the hope that we might learn MORE ABOUT OURSELVES

by JAMES AYLETT, Esq.

What am I trying to do?People have been managing information - setting it down, arranging and sort-ing it - for thousands of years, in all likelihood for longer than we have had language as we know it. However it is only comparatively recently that we have started to think about this as a distinct process. For many people today, there is little distinction between how information is organised, and how it is repre-sented; however in dealing with the quantity and range of information on the web, we have no choice but to spend significant effort on this, finding useful patterns and structures in our data, designing how those structures will be accessible, indexable, categorised, sorted, sliced, diced and perhaps even stored - all before we can think about how we might display anything at all.

Yet the actions and tools of Information Architecture are, for the most part, not new. Some - the construction and use of taxonomies, for instance - have a fairly well-documented history. I’ve been wondering recently if there might be other tools, less cleanly separated from design and representation, which we can reverse engineer out of the history of information, allowing us to trans-late older skills to the new problems of the web age.

More generally, it seems to me that the most interesting improvements in most areas come from consideration of or inspiration from something com-pletely dissimilar, and the world of information architecture is likely to be the same.

Where does Samuel Pepys fit in?Pepys, now best known as one of the world’s most interesting diarists, spent almost all his professional life as part of the British Navy administration; what has endeared him to later Naval historians was the detailed quality of records that he and his clerks kept, and the command of the data he was able to show as a result.

However this isn’t the only reasons Pepys’ interested me here. A bibliophile who catalogued his - for the time - extensive library; an inquisitive man who loved to learn about new things; a fellow of the Royal Society who as its Presi-dent was credited on the front page of Newton’s Principia Mathematica; a socialite with friends and contacts amongst the aristocracy and gentry, includ-ing prominent politicians and scientists; a ladies’ man who - at least at the time of the diary - kept fairly detailed accounts of his extra-marital flirting, one-off liaison’s and affairs - he presents a wealth of opportunities to learn from and think about how a man obsessed with details ordered and consid-ered the information at his disposal.

Pepys, I thought, would be an interesting test of my ideas. From a man so inspired, can we find something itself inspiring?

For time and space reason I’ve been forced to restrict myself to just two aspects of his life.

So what have I done?The Women of Samuel Pepys is an attempt to model how he could have kept track of, arranged and recorded his relationships, had he been able to use a web site for these purposes. It brings together aspects of memory, the famous diary, and happenstance into a single tool designed for him alone. It is similar in many ways to current dating sites (albeit with some interesting differences - match.com probably doesn’t need to note whether you’re literate or not), so the new ideas it might throw up are probably limited.

The other aspect I’ve looked at is Pepys’ role as Clerk of Acts at the Navy Board in the mid 1660s. After some attempts to think about the person-to-person interactions, concentrating on the data flowing between them, I came up with a less ambitious tack of modelling a web site for the Lord High Admi-ral (James, Duke of York, later King James II) to ask for a new ship to be built.

In both cases I have tried to encapsulate an aspect of Pepys’ life as if it were entirely underpinned by a web-based platform. In the case of the Navy Board, although it would be possible to design a web interface for this, it’s interesting to consider the implications of a web system that is taking the place of a man (in this case, Pepys). Not wanting to redesign a historical figure, it is perhaps worth questioning whether we’d even want to replace him with a computer-ised information system of any sort - assuming that Princes, Lords and Cap-tains were all computer literate.

Did it work?To the extent that I don’t seem to have discovered anything new, it hasn’t worked. However I did gain a lot of clarity around some of the issues arising from modern web sites and related systems, and so it seems to have borne out my idea that this sort of investigation would prove helpful in some way.

References and linksAll original images are either available now or will be soon on Flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/jaylett/. If I have the chance to take this any further I’ll blog it at http://tartarus.org/james/ - let me know if you’re interested in collabo-rating on this crazy idea.

There are many interesting books on Pepys and his times; I have restricted myself (and hence, perhaps, the impartiality and accuracy of my viewss) to Samuel Pepys - The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin (ISBN 0-140-28234-3) and Samuel Pepys and his world by Geoffrey Trease (now out of print) and what I remembered hazily from school.

I would like to thank my colleagues at DoubleClick for support and assistance while preparing this, in particular Vlad Sinaniyev, Edward Barnes and George Zafirovski. In addition, working at Tangozebra, and our former sister com-pany 26 London, has provided me with many interesting conversations, chal-lenges and opportunities to learn over the last ten years.

Women of Samuel Pepys - site path

1. Find women for encounters2. Reminisce on previous encounters3. Record progress with a particular woman

Women of Samuel Pepys

On the face of it a common problem (dating sites seem increasingly indistinguishable from Facebook), but with some differences. For instance, because there is only one user, there is no scope for messaging, and discovery of other people is not under the remit of the site at all.

Pepys’ knowledge of the women in his life would generally have been remembered, although he did commit details in his diary (and apparently flicked through to reminisce). Of course he would not have arranged meetings in any formal way, although some were planned and he made engagements in some cases (not always kept, on either side). Constructing so many different aspects of Pepys’ life as one system seems artificial, but part of my purpose here is to try to make sense out of dissimilar threads.

If anyone out there runs a dating site: do you allow searching by whether people like to dance?

Women of Samuel Pepys - storyboard

Simplified to some extent, and in particular not including editing facili-ties, which could be added easily enough at the cost of making the diagram somewhat too large to clearly reproduce at this size.

Women of Samuel Pepys - concepts

This is by no means complete (as with all the work I’ve done here, I’ve tried for shallow cuts over a wider area), but already has kicked off some ideas, at least for me - although literacy is not a concern of dating web sites, do we need to have a site specialising in bookshop dates, in the same way we have coffeedate.com? What happens if we add in the functionality of Dopplr? Or are we complicating matters too far - and perhaps we don’t need spe-cialised dating sites in the face of perva-sive social networks.

The Women of Samuel Pepys

A rough design to show how you might conceivably put those pieces together. This obvi-ously has nothing to do with the information architecture or management, but makes it a little more concrete, and provides something slightly more interesting to look at while you’re trying to figure out what’s going on. Similarly this text is mostly here for your amusement.

I have, however, tried to carry through something of the idea of this being an extension of Pepys’ mind to how this works - which is why as you descend further into the system, the earlier functions are available in enclosing layers, rather than stacking them or some-thing as might be more usable. It probably wouldn’t actually work for a deeper system, unfortunately.

Navy Board

I made some early attempts to consider flow of information in different scenarios Pepys would have been involved with; preparing reports for parliament and providing evidence to support proposals to the rest of the Board, for instance. I was probably too

ambitious (I considered money a type of informa-tion, since in the form of bribes it carries additional meaning), making them more accurate but less help-ful. In the “York Query” (the Duke of York asking for more ships), I tried to avoid these types of complex-ity, and instead looked at how the “user” (York) could engage with the asynchronous processes put into action on his behalf and how the change of state of the key process (building a ship) interacts with him and other parts of the system. Finally I made a simple attempt at a site path and matching design draft.

York Query - the processes

Complex web systems frequently use asynchronous processes, and most of the time they are hidden away from users. However in some situations it is useful to expose them. In the case of building a ship, a process that lasted around nine months, not exposing this to the user as a part of the information architecture to be queried and otherwise interacted with will probably result in a system that fails: if you can’t ask how that last ship you started build-ing is going, your users will lose faith rapidly. There’s no fundamental difference between having a ship built and buying some books from Amazon.

Something else occurred to me while thinking of the people involved in the proc-ess. Most of them actually map to a particular piece of enterprise technology (a message queue), but if you give them computer perso-nas you end up with some-thing akin to Little Moo.

York Query - site path

Only major point of interest here is that I’ve introduced an asynchronous notification: when a ship is built, we want to send word directly to York. (This also might happen at other stages.) The only way I could think of drawing this here was to have an arrow going back out to the user, which isn’t all that clear. This encompasses all sorts of notifications, including Pepys walking up to York in the park to let him know what’s going on, or the Navy Board sending a notification by SMS (the Ship-related Messenger Service).

Lots of sites do this now, so it’s not really a surprise to try to capture these kinds of interac-tion. More generally, there are increasing numbers of cases where the content and services from a website are used in other contexts, be it via a Facebook app, through email or SMS noti-fication, or something almost completely different such as a Nabaztag - and the future is only going to bring more.

York Query - data states

This was mostly an experiment to see if playing with the lifecycle of our asynchronous process (building a ship) would make any of the points where that process touches the user clearer. I’m not convinced it does, but on the other hand when we consider proc-esses to be a part of the information architecture for a system, we probably need to have these lifecycles available in a fair amount of detail. Here the process appears fixed, and the states it passes through cannot be designed by us, but in some cases the competitive advantage of a particular web site may come entirely from the improvement of a particular common process. In fact a new shipbuilding method, or a change in the processes that support existing methods, could be employed to streamline the lifecycle (Pepys attempted this with timber and mast procure-ment, for instance). So here we have a tool for looking for points where this kind of innovation will have the most impact.

And what is your part in this?

We need a detailed history of the Navy

I need more ships!

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SAMUEL PEPYS, Esq.CLERK OF ACTS to the NAVY BOARD

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And when did you last see your father?