Well, I’m back from a wonderful trip to the Southwest, and the first thing I saw when I went to EurekAlert was this press release about dictionaries and brains. An analysis of the way language is structured (how many words at different levels of complexity, for example) shows that dictionaries have apparently arrived at a state of optimal organization. Specifically, dictionaries are arranged in the most economical manner so as to minimize their size, mirroring the way the human brain organizes its internal lexicon in such a way as to minimize the mental machinery it requires to retrieve word meanings. In this respect dictionaries are similar to other technologies—e.g., writing—that are tailored toward reducing the mental effort required to use them.
What’s fascinating about this is that no one, as far as I know, ever sat down to study how to make a dictionary maximally efficient; I’m assuming it just happened over generations of dictionary creation and tinkering. Anyone who has had to help design or present, or for that matter use, online information or services, can vouch for the fact that there are many ways to go wrong. Perhaps there is an evolutionary process at work that weeds out the bad approaches, and eventually we’ll have a maximally useful web page/web application design, but in the meanwhile we have to sit in meetings and argue over how to organize information so people can find it. Do you suppose the early dictionary makers worried about usability studies?
