You're welcome, I'm sure. I'm lucky enough to have a decent size yard and I spend a lot of time trying to see things from the perspective of the animal and plant life that inhabits it. A lot of our information problems (imho) come from too much detail of specificity at the wrong scale. You don't look at a tree as a collection of leaves, or draw one by cataloguing all their sizes. Likewise a tree rarely grows as a pure function of its DNA-encoded phyllotaxis patterns, but rather a combination of those and the variations of its environment - soil composition,w ater, other roots, helper fungi, sunlight, prevailing winds, and local animal life. It's truly amazing to watch the interactions between different plants and trees over a period of years.
I think because we're so used being able to catalog, measure, categorize and sort our various files and directory structures, manipulate them programmatically, have our browsers or operating systems identify a particular leaf by reference or just by searching for some of the micro-structure within it (usually words) etc. etc. we tend to overlook the organicess of how a data collection grows and opt instead of producing analytics measuring it. It'd be like trying to describe a tree with tables of vector statistics about the angle and length of branch sections - it's valid in certain ways, but doesn't give you a good sense of the tree's shape or structure. It's as if we've developed a sort of techno-myopia towards the shape of our own output and activities, and approach everything by dissecting it into slices and then ranking them by various criteria.
That goal has been stated and sought repeatedly, usually with poor results.
Microsoft Bob is probably the most infamous example. An early-dot-com-era roommate worked at Xerox PARC which had its own spatial 3D file manager / management interface. There were three principle problems:
- It severely taxed the limits of available consumer hardware at the time.
- It was confusing as hell.
- It didn't solve any real-world problem(s), and made numerous others worse.
Though in fairness it did somewhat resember Doom / Castle Wolfenstein....
File or document management shouldn't be the most intensive process your computer does, it should be one of the least intensive, saving processing power for Real Work, and not being resource-starved when you actually need to use it.
The organisation(s) that seem most useful are lists, lists of lists (hierarchies), tag-based systems, or search-based systems. (The fact that file-based search remains primitive in most system is its own small wonder of modern computing, though yes, the situation is slightly improved over, say, 30 years ago.)
Oh yes, I remember being impressed by its awfulness. by comparison Clippy was...not terrible.
I think part of what made 3d and other very visual file managers so bad (or at best, very slow like Treemappers) is the effort to render everything accurately at once, which is bound to be slow across terabyte scales.
Maybe we would be better off exploring Voronoi/blob/fisheye network diagrams for representing context, with the size indicating the number of files nested within. The Carrot2 search engine implements a variation of this idea which is sometimes very useful for topic exploration.
Render lag and lossyness is part of it, but there's more.
I've had a fair bit of experience with large book archives (university libraries), and have a pretty good sense of what "a million books" looks like (a large on-campus multi-storey building might house 1--5 million books). There's a physical progression, from the words on a page (~250 typewritten, about 500 typeset), to pages in a chapter, chapters in a book, books on a shelf, bookcase, aisle, library floor, building, campus, etc.
A well-organised library gives structure to navigating that space, logically, metaphorically, and literally. And there's a lot of hard work that goes into that organisation.
Simply tossing a 3-D overlay onto a file manager ... isn't that. And most of the projects I've encountered either don't realise that, or don't give that fact its due.
For that matter, the concepts of search and locality (as in, works near each other) have entirely different manifestations online and in a physical archive. Shelf-reading is still one of my favourite pastimes.
