Description

We organize things/ we organize information/ we organize information about things/ and we organize information about information. But even though “organizing” is a fundamental and ubiquitous challenge/ when we compare these activities their contrasts are more apparent than their commonalities. We propose to unify many perspectives about organizing with the concept of an Organizing System/ defined as an intentionally arranged collection of resources and the interactions they support. Every Organizing System involves a collection of resources/ a choice of properties or principles used to describe and arrange resources/ and ways of supporting interactions with resources. By comparing and contrasting how these activities take place in different contexts and domains/ we can identify patterns of organizing. We can create a discipline of organizing in a disciplined way. The 4th edition builds a bridge between organizing and data science. It reframes descriptive statistics as organizing techniques/ expands the treatment of classification to include computational methods/ and incorporates many new examples of data-driven resource selection/ organization/ maintenance/ and personalization. It introduces a new “data science” category of discipline-specific content/ both in the chapter text and in endnotes/ marked with [DS] in editions that contain endnotes.