The most obvious characteristic of a growing collection is that it takes up more space; and it is usually space that we haven’t got. Many people are disinclined to have clear-outs unless they really have to, and so, as a collection gets bigger, the clearout task seems more and more difficult so is less and less likely to happen. Whether it’s a desk drawer, a garage, or a mobile phone, we usually end up having to have a rapid clear out in order to make room for the new things we urgently want to store.

Another feature of a collection that’s getting bigger is that it often gets harder and harder to see what it contains and to find something within it. Sometimes things just become invisible and then forgotten about in an amorphous mass of stuff. Even if a collection is well organised, it is very likely that mistakes will be made and items will get stored in the wrong place. Over a period of time such errors may result in a significant number of misplaced items that can’t be found. This problem is exacerbated by the way in which we often design our storage to be easy to get things out, whereas it would be more helpful in the long term to make it easy to put things away in the correct place.

In the longer term, large unmanaged collections will require increased removal effort when we move house; and they will present more of a problem than a joy for those who inherit.

Marie Kondo in her book ‘The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying’ believes that letting collections grow like topsy is not just a practical problem, but that it actually affects people’s lives. She says that, if you keep putting stuff away in drawers or boxes, before you realise it your past will become a weight that holds you back and keeps you from living in the here and now.

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Marie Kondo, the author of ‘The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying’, has some very clear answers to this question. She says we that we keep things because either we become too attached to the past or we have a fear of the unknown future; and that we fail to get to grips with clutter as an instinctive reflex to avoid thinking about the other issues in our lives. That we may become too attached to the past seems a valid point, however the other two assertions may be a little speculative, and, in any case are made with respect to one’s general household possessions. If we consider something rather more specific such as photos, people seem to keep them a) as a reminder of the past, and b) to share their experiences with others. There are many aspects to the first reason including:

• to remind you of someone you really liked, or perhaps hated (at least one philosopher believes that photos allows us to literally see people and places and objects that are long gone or far away);
• to escape from the present to the past because it is somehow more enjoyable than the present;
• to augment a vague memory and see how it really was;
• to experience a moment again and the feelings you had at that moment.

Most of these reasons could also be said to apply to keeping letters sent from someone you were close to. However, there are two other important reasons for keeping letters – to be able to find out facts about the sender at a later date; and also to act as a focal point for reflection – reflection about the relationships one has had and about the value of friendship.

We keep our personal writings, diaries and poetry for similar reasons, though, in this case, the reflection we may wish to do is about how we feel about things, what we have done and how we have conducted ourselves. Interestingly, the ability to find out something you had forgotten from personal writings includes the ability to find out the true facts about something you had remembered wrongly. One’s own published work is rather different. Such material is probably kept because it represents the individual and the work he/she has done. There’s an element of pride involved. If the material was lost or destroyed then somehow the individual would feel a part of their being was missing.

Many of the reasons already discussed also apply to mementos – documents and artefacts that people acquire in the course of things they are doing or experiencing. However, to try and understand keeping rationale further and to provide an aid which would help people decide what to keep and what to discard, an analysis of a work memento collection was undertaken. Out of that exercise emerged a so-called Wish Table with the following categories of reasons for keeping (the percentages indicate the relative numbers of approximately 500 personal mementos that the Wish Table was subsequently applied to):

• Not forget (1%)
• To be reminded of (28%)
• Reference (42%)
• Feel pride (7%)
• Pass on to family (9%)
• Too special to get rid of (20%)
• Unusual (5%)

The ‘pass on to family’ reason is particularly important as most people seem to have an interest in where they came from and in the history of their forebears. As people grow older, some perhaps realise that it is incumbent upon them to pass on their knowledge and artefacts safely to the following generation – otherwise the knowledge about the family will get lost and forgotten in the passage of time.

The types of objects already mentioned – photos, letters, personal writings, published work, mementos – are all very intimately related to the individual. We might imagine that other objects may be kept for rather more mundane reasons. For example, people may keep books simply because they like the touch and feel of them and like having them around. However, books also make a statement about an individual and their personal interests and what information and ideas they have been subjected to. The same goes for record collections.

One of the more unusual types of objects explored in this site is a collection of T-shirts with logos or legends. These were kept because they were evidence of being somewhere or doing something; or because they were a reminder of an experience or a person.

Collections in the more formal sense of the word (such as stamp collections) tend to have less of an intimate relationship to oneself. They are usually started because a person has an interest in the particular type of object that is being collected, and because there is a desire to complete the collection – or at least to expand it to be significant in size and comprehensive in content. People find it fun to collect things, and see it as an interesting hobby with which they can fill some of their spare time, or which provides a diversion from the other parts of their lives.

In summary, the experiences of this site suggest that people keep things because they like to be reminded of the past and to be able to reflect on it. They perceive some objects to define them in some way and therefore would feel less whole without them; and they see the importance of maintaining a history of the family. These all seem perfectly good and healthy reasons for keeping things – provided they don’t become all-consuming or disruptive to day-to-day life.

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If you are going to spend a lot of time and effort organising and managing your collections, at some point you and others may start to wonder things like why you are doing it and is it worth it. The following five questions seem to be the ones that are most useful to get some answers to before embarking on OFC activities. Each of them is discussed in subsequent units.

U3.1  Why do we keep things?
U3.2  What problems arise as collections build up?
U3.3  What are the pros and cons of organising your collections?
U3.4  Why use digital technology to organise your collections?
U3.5  Why bother exploiting your collections?

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In many of the topics explored in this site (letters, music, photos, finances, etc.) there have been huge changes over the last, say, 70 years. So much so that a description of how we used them in my youth might only be vaguely recognised by my grown-up children; but it will be completely unrecognisable – maybe even incomprehensible – to my grandchildren as they grow up in the coming years. This represents a huge gap in knowledge and understanding when it comes to these younger generations making decisions about what memories, information, artefacts and practices to keep or discard. To illustrate the point, and perhaps to inform the younger reader, below are several descriptions of how it was in the past and how it is today.

Music
The past: For the first 60 years of the 1900s, records were sold in the 78 rpm (revolutions per minute) format. By the 1960s, these had been replaced by LP records (Long Playing, 33 rpm). People bought records and played them over and over again and really got to know their contents. Most people had a collection of LPs which took up quite a lot of space and was fairly heavy. Smaller cassette tapes arrived and a place for them was found in the record cabinet. Most houses had a large stereo music system which could play all these formats and which included a radio as well. Then CDs arrived and people replaced their records and tapes with them – and of course had to buy new equipment to play them on.

Today: People download digital music onto their mobile phones – sometimes whole albums, sometimes single tracks. They play them through their headphones or over stand alone wi-fi loudspeakers. Some prefer to just subscribe to a streaming service like Spotify and have access to millions of songs.

Photos
The past: For most of the 1900s, people used to buy a film of between 12 and 40 photos, load it into their camera, take pictures, and then take it to a shop for developing. When the prints came back and they’d been shown to family and friends, some people put them in albums but most just put them in boxes or drawers. When someone died, the photos that were found were passed down the family.

Today: We have a camera with us all the time in our mobile phones. We take photos at will, discard the rubbish ones and keep the rest indefinitely . Sometimes we share them in systems like Instagram and Facebook. Eventually we find we’ve run out of space on our phones and we have to delete some or move them elsewhere. When someone dies their mobile phone, and all the photos it contains, may be passed onto the family for them to sort out.

Books
The past: Books were produced by publishers who selected authors, and arranged the printing and distribution of the books. Authors who couldn’t find a publisher willing to invest in them were able to make their own arrangements for their books to be printed – but at a substantial price. Printing was a large scale engineering operation which used a variety of mechanical techniques for creating a plate from which multiple copies could be printed.  In the 1980s, computer-based printing systems emerged in which pages were created  in publishing software and printed directly on digitally controlled printers.

Today: E-books, which can be read on a tablet computer, are widespread. Hundreds of e-books can be stored in one tablet and can be read anywhere. Despite the popularity of e-books, physical book sales are still holding their own. Physical book production is cheap: individuals can download their completed texts to specialist services on the net and get a one-off physical copy for the price of two or three rounds of drinks. Alternatively they can elect to have a specialist web site sell their book online in e-book form. However, authors still have great difficulty in finding a publisher who is prepared to invest in them and fund a print run of physical books and organise their distribution and sale.

Money
The past: In the middle of the 1900s some people didn’t have a bank account and just used cash. Even in the 1970s many people were still given pay packets containing physical cash. Those who did have a bank account were sent hardcopy statements every week or month. Payment in and out of the accounts was mainly by cash or cheque. Cash was obtained by queuing up in the bank and handing over a cheque for cash from your account. Most big banks had a branch in every town. Loans were usually provided through the bank but were given close scrutiny and were approved only for specific purposes. People paid for goods with cash or cheque. In the 1960s,to reduce fraud, people were issued with cheque cards which they had to sign and then present to shopkeepers along with their cheque.

Today: Most people have a bank account, an associated debit card, and a variety of credit cards. Debit and credit cards are as acceptable as cash. Contactless payment by passing these cards over a machine, is widespread. Many people are in overall debt across all their accounts. Large numbers of loan firms push their services and encourage people to apply, though many of them impose punitive interest rates. Cash is obtained by using debit and credit cards in cash machines which are widely available. Online bank accounts are commonplace, and users are able to use them to make their own payments to other people’s accounts. Banks are increasingly shutting down their local branches.

Letters
The past: For centuries we have been writing letters and sending them to each other. They were personal, informative and reflective; and they took a little time to write. People often kept the letters they got from the special people in their lives. You didn’t get too many letters, so waiting for the postman’s delivery used to be something to look forward to.

Today: We get loads of hardcopy mail – but most of it is junk. We are also deluged by email both at work and at home – too much to handle really – and replying has to be done quickly. We also send and receive large numbers of texts which somehow seem better because they are short and quicker to create and deal with. We have huge collections of emails and texts held within the systems they came in, which we are able to search and retrieve at will. However, moving these stores or accumulating them together is not a practical proposition, and probably a little pointless given the huge volumes involved. They are useful just as they are, but useless in any other state. We don’t write too much that is reflective, however we do keep in much closer touch with the minutiae of the lives of our families and friends through systems like Facebook.

Diaries
The past: People used to carry little pocket sized diaries with them. They contained a space or page for every day of the year, and sections for addresses, phone numbers, and notes. If you lost your diary it could be disastrous and you might never again be able to find some of the information it contained. People kept their old paper diaries and were able to look up what they were doing or somebody’s address many years later. Some people kept larger diaries, and wrote reflective summaries of what they’d been doing on a particular day.  Business people often kept separate diaries at work. Many families had a shared calendar in a prominent position in the house.

Today: Calendar and name and address information is mainly kept in mobile phones and/or email systems which are usually backed up in the cloud. Some people still use a paper diary as well to record their appointments. Old calendar information is always available in the current system you are using; but special effort is required to extract it and maintain it in some separate store. Many families still maintain physical shared calendars in the house.

Phones
The past: The landline telephone was hugely important throughout the 1900s. Nearly all businesses and households were connected and their numbers could be found in the local phone book which was delivered free to every house and office; or via the free national directory enquiry service. For those without a phone, or away from home or office, public phone boxes were installed locally in every town and village. In the 1990s, phone-based voice messaging systems became popular as an alternative to the emerging email systems; and voice conferencing started to become an essential business tool.

Today: Most people carry their own mobile phone with them everywhere, and make and receive calls anytime, anywhere. The mobile phone handset has become a powerful personal computer in its own right and includes a sophisticated camera, the ability to store and play music, and facilities to send and receive email and to access web sites. Many households and offices also continue to have their landlines as well, though people are increasingly questioning the value of having both. A whole variety of directory services offer to find landline numbers – but at a cost. Finding out mobile phone numbers is more difficult – individuals usually just provide their number to those who need it. Voice messaging systems have sunk without trace. Voice conferencing remains an essential business tool – though it is often provided through internet-based services. In fact, the internet provides an effective free alternative phone capability which delivers video as well as voice, and many people use this via services such as Skype to keep in touch with their immediate families if they are living far apart.

Information
The past: In the 1970s, there was no internet, there were no web sites, and email was for specialists in the know. If you wanted information – say product information, for example – you sent away for it, received it in the overland mail, used it, and then filed it for future use. If you needed to find out facts, people used the dictionaries, thesauri, and encyclopaedias that they had in their homes and offices. For more in-depth information people used to go to libraries.

Today: Most information is available on tap in web sites; and that’s where it stays because readers know the latest version will be there next time they want to use it – people are now much less inclined to keep information locally. In fact, there is so much information on the net that people now regard it as their second memory and instinctively google information when they encounter a gap in their knowledge during a conversation. They also use the net to research anything and everything about potential employees or people they’ve just met – what their experience is, what they’ve been doing, what they look like and where they live. Even obtaining pictures of almost any object is easy using image searches. However, the longevity of information on the net is not assured: web sites are being updated or removed all the time. So, people may be being lulled into a false sense of security about what the net can be relied on to provide in the long term.

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Digital Technology is essentially equipment and systems powered by computers. Common types of Digital Technology include laptops, tablets, mobile phones, apps, wi-fi, internet web sites, and email. To get a computer to work, its instructions (the programme), and the data the programme works on, are turned into codes made up of simple digits. The computer then performs mathematics on this huge mass of digital codes. Hence the process of getting things such as papers, books, photos and whole systems of information and actions, into a form that a computer can deal with, is often called Digitisation.

For individuals and households, the most useful pieces of digitisation equipment are the scanner,  the digital camera, and the personal computer. Scanners turn physical paperwork into electronic files that computers can manage, display and even understand; and digital cameras do the same for whatever they are pointed at.  A personal computer (such as a laptop, tablet, or smart phone) enables those electronic files to be stored, edited and searched.

Digital technology can be used to augment collections or to replicate or replace collections. In the OFC context, augmenting a collection means using a computer to store information about a collection in order to manage it and to retrieve items from it. Replicating a collection in the OFC context, means making digital copies of the physical items in the collection. If the physical items are then discarded, the digital replicas effectively replace the items in the collection.

While many of our possessions are physical, we are encountering an increasing number of things that are created by computers and so are already in digital form. Such ‘born digital’ items (for example, emails, downloadable music, and ebooks) may not require initial digitisation, but they too still require a personal computer with which to store, manage and search them. Indeed, some developments in digital technology are not just additional things to deal with – they completely disrupt the way we live. For example, digital music has completely changed the way we buy and listen to music; and the old approach of buying a roll of film, taking photos and getting it developed has been almost completely extinguished. It is within this context of disruptive change that individuals and householders are having to make choices about what new technologies to buy into, and about how to adapt the way they used to do things to get the best of old and new.

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The term ‘collection’ is used in its broadest sense in the OFC context. It refers to any specific group of physical or digital things. The word specific is used deliberately to emphasise that this is a pre-specified group of objects bounded in some specific way by, for example, type (eg. letters) or location (eg. attic) or container (eg. folder). Collections may include almost anything – large (eg.vintage cars), small (eg. coins), or diverse (eg. a jumble of all sorts of stuff in an attic).

Some collections are started deliberately (eg. stamps); however, others just emerge accidentally and build up over time. Sometimes we put things in places or in piles as a holding mechanism with the intention of doing something with them at a later date. Often, we never get round to doing whatever it was we were going to do – and we may even keep adding items to the collection. In other cases, we start out with a set of things in an organised state (eg. in wardrobes or kitchen cupboards or file boxes) but as we add things and use things and fail to discard useless items, a much enlarged, disorganised collection emerges over a period of time.

Collections owned by one particular person are simpler to apply OFC techniques to as there is only one person who has to make decisions about the objects. It is usually more complicated when collections are owned by two or more people as is the case when, for example, a couple clear out the contents of their garage. Of course, it is even more complicated to apply OFC techniques to collections owned by other people, as, for example, when someone attempts to assist an older infirm relative move out of their house. In all circumstances where two or more people are involved, it is necessary for all parties to agree about what to do with each object; and it is preferable that they should all positively buy-in to what has been agreed.

One other type of owner may also need to be considered in an OFC exercise; that is the family member, other person, or organisation to whom a collection may be given upon the death of the current owner. Aids to help owners think through the requirements of such parties will be discussed in this tutorial.

Most collections will consist of objects which are either all physical or all digital; though some collections (such as the collection of household files described elsewhere in this site) are a hybrid of both physical and digital. Of course, after an OFC exercise has been completed, a collection may well have become a hybrid containing either some physical objects and some digital objects, or some objects which are present in both physical and digital forms; or perhaps a combination of both these hybrid forms. Elsewhere in this tutorial the notion of optimising the hybrid will be explored – that is, the ability to make best use of the particular advantages offered by the physical and the digital respectively.

Most collections are in place to be able to use the items within them in some way or other. However, often, much of the content remains untouched, unseen, or even forgotten.  An important objective of OFC techniques is to inspire new ways to exploit the contents of collections – to bring them to life, to make them more visible, and to enable their owners to enjoy them.

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The term Order From Chaos is widely used in many different contexts. A quick search on Google reveals that it appears in areas as diverse as heavy metal music, foreign policy, and science. On this site, however, the term is used  to refer to the notion that efficient ways of sorting and organising things can be combined with the power of the computer to produce a more ordered, accessible, and useful set of objects.

Initially, when the concept was first developed in the 1980s, the idea related to physical objects. However, as the use of computers grew to permeate all aspects of our lives, we have had to contend with an increasing number of objects that were created in digital form (often referred to as ‘born digital’). Hence, this site has been exploring Order from Chaos concepts for both physical and digital objects.

The word ‘chaos’ does imply a degree of disorder; however, it must be remembered that chaos is relative and in the eye of the beholder. For example, several piles of paper in a study might appear disorganised, while the owner may have placed them deliberately and knows exactly where to find a particular item. Hence, there are no perfect solutions – only possibilities from which an individual or household can select an option which works for them.

I haven’t come across any other people investigating this exact same meaning of the term, though there are undoubtedly other people working in related fields. However, I have not made an exhaustive search to identify them: I have  only sought to find information and people in relation to specific questions that have arisen in this work. Therefore, readers should keep in mind that there are likely to be many other related views and experiences out there.

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The term Order From Chaos is used in many different circumstances in colloquial speech. However, it has a specific meaning in the context of this tutorial – namely the organisation of any set of things with the assistance of Digital Technologies. Examples of such things include: Music Collections, Loft Contents, Family Photos, Household Files, and Letters. Such Collections of material usually start out being in a purely physical form, however, a growing amount of material is now being created in digital form with a consequential huge impact on the way we live.

This first three parts of this section explore the terms, ‘Order From Chaos’, ‘Collections’, and ‘Digital Technology’, in more detail. They discuss their specific meanings and indicate their range of coverage within the context of this tutorial.  The final part of the section seeks to remind us of the changes that Digital Technology has made on our collections and the way we use them.

Before venturing further, readers should bear in mind an overarching point about the scope of the whole tutorial: most of the findings in this site relate to only one household and cannot be used to reach general conclusions; they show only what can be done, NOT what everybody is doing. As such its findings and conclusions can only be used as a starting point for further thinking and investigation.

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Welcome to this Order From Chaos Online Tutorial. Since 2012 I’ve been exploring how to organise, digitise, show, share, bring to life, preserve, and pass on our physical and digital objects; and this tutorial is intended to draw out the lessons I’ve learned and recorded in the pwofc.com web site.

The tutorial takes the form of a series of units, each one providing a few screenfulls of main points with links to supporting posts elsewhere in this site (it’s not possible to link exclusively to specific text within a post).

The Contents List is below.

U1.     Welcome – this post

U2.0.  Scope & Terminology – Introduction
U2.1   Scope & Terminology – Order From Chaos
U2.2   Scope & Terminology – Collections
U2.3   Scope & Terminology – Digital Technology
U2.4   Scope & Terminology – Understanding today in the context of yesterday

U3.0   Why do it? – Introduction
U3.1   Why do it? – Why do we keep things?
U3.2   Why do it? – What problems arise as collections build up?
U3.3   Why do it? – What are the pros and cons of organising your collections?
U3.4   Why do it? – Why use digital technology to organise your collections?
U3.5   Why do it? – Why bother exploiting your collections?

U4.0   Approach– Introduction
U4.1   The basic approach – with no digital support
U4.2   A model of OFC activities
U4.3   Examples of OFC projects
U4.4   Points to bear in mind

U5.0   How to do it – Introduction
U5.1   How to do it – Define what & why
U5.2   How to do it – Plan
U5.3   How to do it – Sort & organise
U5.4   How to do it – Digitise – Introduction
U5.4.1   Digitise – Technology requirements
U5.4.2   Digitise – Titles, metadata, indexes and labelling
U5.4.3   Digitise – Choosing to retain or discard
U5.5   How to do it – Store
U5.6   How to do it – Use
U5.7   How to do it – Exploit
U5.8   How to do it – Maintain

U6.0   OFC in the future – Introduction
U6.1   The future of OFC items and collections
U6.2   The future impact of recent developments
U6.3   The future impact of AI
U6.4   A summary view of the OFC future  

Unit 6.4 is the last unit of this OFC Online Tutorial

The preparatory work is done. After categorising and recategorising 440 excerpts from this blog and a few other notes, I believe I’m now in a position to provide a coherent account of the topic that the blog is devoted to – ‘Order from Chaos, Digitisation and their Intersection’. In the course of doing this analysis, I’ve revised the model that I started out with in the post of 29June2017. It now looks like this:

The change was necessitated by the need to provide a set of contents that can be sensibly written about and easily understood. However, I’m not going to write a paper. Instead, I’ll be creating an online tutorial in subsequent posts in this blog. I’m confident that such a presentation will work because I produced something similar on the subject of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) in Lotus Notes before I retired. The structure of this tutorial will take a similar form – each unit will provide one or two screenfulls of main points, and within those main points will be links to supporting material from elsewhere in this blog.