I thought I'd blog some responses on the mailing lists (sigia-l and aifia-members) on my research agenda for information architecture post. Good stuff, from many people much more clever than me.
By the way, for my Belgian readers and others: the AIFIA mailing list is members only, and in and by itself a great reason to become member of AIFIA. So sign up. At 20US$ for students and 40US$ for professionals, it's great value. If you are from a third world country you can even sign up for free. Belgian readers: a company-wide signup is 200US$ a year.
Anne Miller: "HCI, human factors, anthropology, ethnography and so on are coming to and perhaps usurping AI because the problem spaces we investigate lead us to questions that involve categorisation (IA) issues. Thus we come to IA with an understanding about where IA fits in a broader problem space; what we don't have but are in many ways developing are methods and orientations for dealing with categorisation problems. What does this say about AI? First is says that IA has a place. Second it says that IA would benefit from looking at broader problem spaces so that it can take charge of the development of techniques development. Third, it may say that IA needs to better define itself as a contributor in a multi-disciplinary research context so that IA researchers can claim their seat at the research table.
By engaging with other disciplines (sharing disciplinary secrets!!!) does IA risk loosing it's identify? Quite probably but then this is the nature of scientific (r)evolution (Kuhn's Paradigm). It's not so much that IA will loose its identity as much as that it will morph into something else through the integration of its methods with other methods and approaches. This is exactly what has happened to HCI."
Peter Morville: "
I'm not sure PeterMe deserves or claims credit for first bringing facets to IA. A bunch of librarians at a company called Argus did some of the earliest work in this area
[...]
I've always seen IA as an applied field
[...]
I agree that it would be great to see more research that's specific and useful to the practice of IA, but practitioners have limited influence over the research agendas of academic institutions."
Sarah Brodwall writes in to say she is investigating prototype theory and how it might apply to IA. Great! Go Sarah go!
Keith Instone: "So like Mr. Morville, I am not so pessimistic. To me the first step is getting the practitioners to explain the problems they are facing so that the researchers can study something that has value outside the ivory tower."
Tessa: "Irrelevant is still a category and even the act of categorization dispels my fears - it must be the logic of it. My nightmare is that no one will want to put a label on our field...as long as there is a label for it, it still has some merit to some one, yes?!!"
Amanda Cossham: "But since I am trying to come to grips with this fascinating field all at once, I've been fairly ruthless and thorough in reading the literature and seeing how IA has developed. Have to say that I agree with Peter Van Dijck's blog entry - there is a dearth of stuff at the moment.
[...]
It takes motivation from those working in the field to document and evaluate and then *disseminate* this information. "
Thomas Vander Wal: "I agree with the seemingly stale nature of IA. I think there are a lot of innovative things going on, but few are bubbling up in research. "
Grant Campbell: "The suggestions for future research you've presented are cool. They look like fun. Cognitive science, social anthropology, business theory--a truly fascinating range of ways to explore the field and to push its boundaries outward. But do people do research because it's fun? Sometimes they do, I suppose. But usually they do research because they have to: either because they're driven to it by inner demons, or driven to it by outer pressures. "
Andrew Boyd: "
I have a pet hypothesis, based on no real-world data whatsoever, that IA has evolved past the initial 'new love' phase of research. There has been sufficient research done such that IA can survive as a viable useful profession - to provide a set of tools for use in the field."
Dmitri Nekrasovski: "I don't think the problem is that HCI is usurping IA, more that HCI is (mostly) unaware of IA:
- The most recent CHI conference had six entries containing IA as a keyword, but most of them came from the design expo, a practitioner-oriented track. None were full-length research papers.
- Search the CHI archive for "findability", and you will get no results that are even remotely related to IA.
- Ask your average HCI researcher (well, at least my colleagues :)) if they are familiar with IA, and you're likely to get either a blank stare or a response to the effect of "isn't that something web developers do?"
With respect to the original post, I definitely agree with the statement "there is a lack of deep IA research" within the research fields I am familiar with. Some of the reasons for this have already
been pointed out: the fact that the vast majority of IA's are practitioners who have no time or inclination for research, the fact that IA has no research forum of its own. I would also add to these a general lack of awareness in the research community of what IA is,
what value it brings, and what interesting research problems can be found within it."
And some more talk about IA's role within the UX universe, and about how clients get confused with what we do.