Kitchen drawers and laundry baskets: On metaphors and data

From I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World by James Geary:

Metaphorical thinking half discovers and half invents the likenesses it describes.

Interesting article at The Verge about how some college students today have trouble understanding the idea of file structures on a computer, having grown up in an era where it always worked to just put everything in one place and use search to find what you need.

Meanwhile, file structure is so intuitive to their professors that they struggle to explain the concept.

I was fascinated by the metaphors that were used on both sides.

One professor said:

“I open a drawer, and inside that drawer, I have another cabinet with more drawers,” he told The Verge. “Like a nested structure. At the very end, I have a folder or a piece of paper I can access.”

Another said:

“I tend to think an item lives in a particular folder. It lives in one place, and I have to go to that folder to find it,” Garland says. “They see it like one bucket, and everything’s in the bucket.”

While another apparently put out a call for useful analogies on Twitter and received suggestions including:

physical tree branches and leaves, kitchen utensils sorted into drawers, books and shelves in a library, “Take their phones away and get ‘em on Windows 98.”

Meanwhile, a student explains how they think of it:

“The most intuitive thing would be the laundry basket where you have everything kind of together, and you’re just kind of pulling out what you need at any given time”

Does it matter that the file structure metaphors include actual file folders, other sorting mechanisms such as drawers and shelves, and even an example from the natural world, while the metaphor used for the other approach is… laundry?

(Am I the only one who wonders if this metaphorical laundry is dirty or clean?)

(Also, note that even the quote that likens the digital files to actual file folders contains a metaphor by using the word “lives”—since files are not literally understood to live.)

I suppose what strikes me here is that information used to feel discrete and finite, something to be cared for and put in its proper place, while now, the total of information feels infinite, where even one’s own files are too vast to even attempt to organize, any more than one would organize the ocean. What does this mean about how we see our files—which are, largely, the work we create and the stuff of our lives? Is there so much of it that it just feels like detritus?

(Possibly related: I can’t stand how OneDrive refers to my files as “My Content.”)

If it seems I’m being too particular about this, here’s Deirdre McCloskey as quoted in I is an Other:

“Unexamined metaphor is a substitute for thinking—which is a recommendation to examine the metaphors, not to attempt the impossible by banishing them,” McCloskey wrote in The Rhetoric of Economics. “Metaphors evoke attitudes that are better kept in the open and under the control of reasoning.”

I spend a lot of time thinking about data structure, because data structure, like all models, is a metaphor.

Here’s McCloskey again:

“The most important example of economic rhetoric . . . is metaphor. Economists call them ‘models.’ To say that markets can be represented by supply and demand ‘curves’ is no less a metaphor than to say that the west wind is ‘the breath of autumn’s being.’ ”

I’ve written a lot about how the shapes we give our stories matter.

But the shapes we give our data matter too.

There are the obvious ways, of course, in which data collection is political—as a trans person, I can always tell a lot by how questions about gender are structured on any particular form or survey.

But there are more subtle ways. When designing a database, which things belong with which things? Which deserve their own field? Which kind of field? Can I trust myself to create a multiple-choice question without excluding anyone’s lived reality? If I can’t, should I proceed with an imperfect multiple-choice question rather than take my chances with open-response?

These are all things I think about.

And then there’s the way I taxonomize my own life.

I recently bought a Supernote Nomad, an e-ink tablet that lets you write “notes” and maintain different “notebooks.” You can add keywords for search, and create headings.

I love writing notes in the Supernote, but I’m still perplexed about how to organize them. What should be its own note? What should be a notebook with various subheadings? What do any of these things say about how I organize my life? Would I make different choices if the words didn’t already prompt me to see these digital files as “notebooks”?

I also love using Obsidian, but this is another tool in which the ways in which to set it up and organize information are basically endless, which means you have to decide what’s right for you. You have to have a preference, or at least some starting hypothesis about how you best relate to your own information and files.

We rely on metaphors even when organizing our own data—even when thinking about how we might want to organize our own data.

It’s worth considering if we’d make different choices with different metaphorical prompts.

Metaphors matter. The shapes we give our data matter.

I’ll give the poet Robert Frost the last word here:

Unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: You don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down.