Where’s that box again?

“I kinda wonder why you’re in that class,” someone at SLIS who will remain unidentified said to me yesterday about the information-architecture course I’m taking. “You already know…”

Well, yes, I do already know HTML and CSS. I have a nodding acquaintance with accessibility best-practices and Apache configuration. I’m not the world’s greatest webmonkey, but I can hack something together when I have to. Not a few of my SLISmates view my proficiencies with wistful envy. Not a few of my IA classmates seem to think that the main purpose of the course is to turn them into webmonkeys like me.

What I don’t know how to do, and I’ve made this clear in everything from my original SLIS application essay to the little info-card I filled out for the IA professor yesterday, is manage the thought processes that lead to the webmonkeying that I already know how to do. Organizational principles (this is huge for me; I know there is method to the madness, I just don’t understand the method!), branding, getting buy-in from all the people involved, usability testing, all that good stuff.

Yet people wonder what I’m doing in an IA class. And me being me, I wonder why they wonder. I have trouble believing it’s a pure misunderstanding of what IA is, an overidentification of IA with webmonkeying. We’re proto-librarians. Architecting information is what we do; the Web is just a new space to do it in.

Is it because I’m a woman? Well, is it? After all, women are supposed to intuitively grasp the needs of others, right? Surely a woman doesn’t need to be trained to figure out what users think, to manage people’s wants and needs, to build consensus. Women have to be trained to do all that icky-nasty computer code stuff.

Yet here I am, quite capable of the code stuff, at a near-total loss in the human miasma surrounding it. It’s enough to make a girl wonder if she’s—well, if she’s really a girl.

I seem to be thinking outside some box or other. Wish I could find it. Wish even more I could dismantle it.