Data Organization

Three experiments investigated how people organize data. Subjects were given sets of 15-20 words and asked to organize them on paper. Each word set had a pre-defined organization (hierarchy, network, lists, table) based on the semantic relations among the words. Experiment 1 showed that college students have all these organizational structures available for use. They organized most word sets on the basis of the semantic relations inherent in them. Whereas most subjects used “appropriate” organizations (those that most easily preserved the relations), a few subjects organized nearly all word sets into lists. Experiment 2 showed that subjects can efficiently fit the word sets into “skeletons” that were explicitly designed to maintain all the semantic relations among the words. Experiment 3 showed that subjects have difficulty in preserving the relations among the words when they were required to organize them into inappropriate structures. These results are evaluated relative to the use of computer-based information retrieval systems. © 1977, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. All rights reserved.