The Miscellaneous Nature of my Well-organized Closet

Thanks a lot Mr. Weinberger. Until yesterday, I considered my closet a conveniently organized collection of interchangeable pieces. Now I am sickened by the inadequate way my organization deals with the endless pairing possibilities of the individual garments. I look at the neatly arranged shirts on the right side of my closet (arranged by color, and within each color, by sleeve length). Looking to the center shelves, I see the organizational structure I have created in my pants that are folded in stacks according to material and length. Moving to the left, I find my dress pants and skirts organized again by color and length. At the bottom of my closet, my shoes can be found grouped according to type (heels, tennis shoes, outdoor shoes, flats, flip-flops, and slippers). It all used to make sense…used to.
If I think of my clothing in the same fashion as the digital photos Weinberger talks about, I realize I will never be able to adequately catalog my clothing because there are too many factors affecting my fashion choices on a daily basis. It is all well and good to have a convenient grouping of colors and sleeve length in shirts, but this organizational structure contributes nothing to the way a single shirt can be paired with any given number of bottoms. Weinberger points out that the nature of a physical object, namely my shirt, makes it impossible to place it in an organizational structure that recognizes, not only its color and sleeve length, but also which wash of denim it pairs best with, or which style and color of shoe goes with it, let alone how it will contribute to an outfit as a whole. Unless I can expand my closet to accommodate the number of copies of a single shirt necessary to encompass all levels of organization, I will never be able to achieve the eloquence of bit organization (since I don’t have the necessary money or space for that expansion, my closet will have to remain inadequate).
My closet is just the most readily accessible example of my new-found frustration over physical organization in comparison to the more sophisticated method of storing and arranging digital data. I guess I always took for granted the ability to search for things online, but after reading the chapters in Weinberger’s book, I have become much more appreciative of the complex ordering system that translates to my hassle-free search for that really great song I don’t know the artist or title to.
I think what interests me most is the concept of metadata. The search I mentioned above is a good example. In a physical ordering system, like a record store, my best hope of finding the album I am looking for without an album title or artist is a very, very knowledgeable clerk. The likelihood of finding a clerk who has that vast of a mental lyric catalog is slim to none. Thanks to metadata, though, I can type into a search engine “It's been too hard living but I'm afraid to die Cuz I don't know what's up there beyond the sky” and find that the song I love is Sam Cooke’s “Change Gon’ Come.” Or if I knew the artist, but not the song title or lyrics, I could type Sam Cooke into a Google search and voilla! I find not only the lyrics to the song, but a biography of Cooke which tells me this song did not gain popularity until after Cooke died, and that it became an anthem for the civil rights movement of the sixties. As Weinberg attests, “In the third order, not only can every word in a book count as metadata, so can any of the sources that link to the book”(104). This vastly increases our ability to learn and discover, because it instantly allows us access to a multitude of sources.
I will always harbor resentment toward Weinberger for facing me with my inability to organize my closet in any sophisticated way, but I have a new-found respect for systems of organization in the digital world. The virtual existence of data has made it possible for us to tailor our information gathering in ways that are far more conducive to our individual ways of categorizing.