Many useful approaches are available to support the structuring of content. It’s important to understand their differences, and how they complement each other. I want to consider content structuring in terms of a spectrum of approaches that address different priorities.
Only a few years ago most discussion about structuring content focused on the desirability of doing it. Now we are now seeing more written about how to do it, spawning discussion around topics such as content models, design patterns, templates, message hierarchies, vocabulary lists, and other approaches. All these approaches contribute to structuring content. Structuring content involves a combination of human decisions, design methods, and automated systems.
Lately I’ve been thinking about how to unlock the editorial benefits of content models, which are generally considered a technical topic. I realized that discussing this angle could be challenging because I would need to separate general ideas about structuring content from concepts that are specific to content models. While content models provide content with structure, so do other activities and artifacts. If the goal is to structure content, what’s unique about content models? We need to unpack the concept of structuring content to clarify what it means in practice.
Yet structuring content is not the true end goal. Structuring content is simply a means to an end. It’s the benefits of structuring content that are the real goal. The expected benefits include improved consistency, flexibility, scaleability, and efficiency. Ultimately, the goal should be to deliver more unique and distinctive content: tailored and targeted to user needs, and reflecting the brand’s strategic priorities.
In reality, content structuring is not a thing. It’s an umbrella term that covers a range of things that promote benefits, such as content consistency and so on. Many approaches contribute. But no single can approach claim “mission accomplished.”
What are we talking about, exactly?
People with different roles and responsibilities talk about structuring content. It sometimes seems like they are talking about different surface features of a giant pachyderm.
“Structured content works well for a media company like The Guardian, but the same approach can work for any organization that publishes large amounts of data on multiple platforms. Whether you’re a government department, art gallery, retailer or university.”
The Guardian
I applaud these sentiments, and endorse them enthusiastically. Helpfully, the article provided tangible examples of how structuring content can make publishing content easier. But the article unintentionally highlighted how terminology on this topic can be used in different ways. The article mentions content reuse as a benefit of content structuring. But the examples related more to republishing finished articles with slight modification, rather than reusing discrete components of content to build new content. When the writer, a solutions architect, refers to a content type, he identifies video as an example. Most content strategists would consider video a content format, not a content type. Similarly, when the article illustrates the Guardian’s content model, it looks very limited in its focus (a generic article) — much more like a content type than a full content model.
Mike Atherton commented on twitter that the article, like many discussions of content structuring, didn’t address distinctions between “presentation structure vs semantic structure, how the two are compatible or, indeed, different, and whether they can or should be captured in the same model.”
Mike raises a fair point: we often talk about different aspects of structure, without being explicit about what aspect is being addressed.
I think about structure as a spectrum. As yet there’s no Good Housekeeping Seal Of Approval on the one right way to structure content. Even people who are united in enthusiasm for content structure can diverge in how they discuss it — as the Guardian article shows. I know other people use different terminology, define the same terminology in different ways, and follow slightly different processes. That doesn’t imply others are wrong. It merely suggests that practices are still far from settled. How an organization uses content structuring will partly depend on the kind of content they publish, and their specific goals. The Guardian’s approach makes sense for their needs, but may not serve the needs of other publishers.
For me, it helps to keep the focus on the value of each distinct kind of decision offers. For those who write simple articles, or write copy for small apps that don’t need to be coordinated with other content, some of these distinctions won’t be as important. Structure becomes increasingly important for enterprises trying to coordinate different web-related tasks. The essence of structure is repeatability.
The Spectrum of content structuring
The structuring of content needs to support different decisions.
Structure brings greater precision to content. It can influence five dimensions:
How content is presented
What content is presented
Where content is presented
What content is required
What content is available
Some of these issues involve audience-facing aspects, and others involve aspects handled by backend systems.
Different aspects of content structure
Content doesn’t acquire its structure at one position along this spectrum. The structuring of content happens in many places. Each decision on the spectrum has a specific activity or artifact associated with it. The issues addressed by each decision can be inter-related. But they shouldn’t become entangled, where it is difficult to understand how each influences another.
UI Design or Interaction Design
UI design is not just visual styling. Interaction design shapes the experience by structuring micro-tasks and the staging of information. From a content perspective, it’s not so much about surface behaviors such as animated transitions, but how to break up the presentation of content into meaningful moments. For example, progressive disclosure, which can be done using CSS, both paces the delivery of content and directs attention to specific elements within the content. Increasingly, UX writers are designing content within the context of a UI design or prototype. They need understand the cross-dependences between the behavior of content and how it is understood and perceived.
The design of behavior involves the creation of structure. Content needs to behave predictably to be understandable. UI design leverages structure by utilizing design patterns and design libraries.
Content Design
Content design encompasses the creation and arrangement of different long and short messages into meaningful experiences. It defines what is said.
Content design is not just about styling words. It involves all textual and visual elements that influence the understanding and perception of messages, including the interaction between different messages over time and in different scenarios. Words are central to content design; some professionals involved with content design refer to themselves as UX writers. Terminology is finely tuned and controlled to be consistent, clear, and on-brand.
Writers commonly break content into blocks of text. They may use a simple tool like Dropbox paper to provide a “distraction free” view of different text elements that’s unencumbered by the visual design. It may look a bit like a template (and is sometimes referred to as one), but it’s purpose is to help writers to plan their text, rather than to define how the text is managed. The design of content relies heavily on the application of implicit structure. Audiences understand better when they are comfortable knowing what they can expect. The design may utilize a message hierarchy (identifying major and minor messages), or voice and tone guidelines that depend on the scenario in which the writing appears. For the most part these implicit structures are managed offline through guidelines for writers, rather than through explicit formal online systems. But some writers are looking to operationalize these guidelines into more formal design systems that are easier and more reliable to use.
Content design involves delivering a mix of the fresh and the familiar. The content that’s fresh, that talks about novel issues or delivers unique or distinctive messages, is unstructured — it doesn’t rely on pre-existing elements. Messages that are familiar (recycled in some way) have the possibility of becoming structured elements. Content design thus involves both the creation of elements that will be reused (such as feedback messaging), and ad hoc content that will be specific to given screen. But even ad hoc elements present the opportunity reuse certain phrases and terminology so that it is consistent with the content’s tone of voice guidelines. Some publishers are even managing strings of phrases to reuse across different content.
Page Templates
Templates provide organizational structure for the content — for example, prioritizing the order of content, and creating a hierarchy between primary and secondary content. The template defines the elements will be consistent for any content using the template, in contrast to the interaction design, which defines the elments that will be fluid and will change and respond to users as they consume the content.
Templates provide slots to fill with content. Page templates specify HTML structure, in contrast to the drafting templates writers use to design specific content elements. Page templates express organizational structure, such as where an image should be placed, or where a heading is needed. The template doesn’t indicate what each heading says, which will vary according to the specifics of the content. Templates can sometimes incorporate fixed text elements, such as copyright notice in the footer of the page, if they are specific to that page and are unlikely to change. The critical role that templates play is that they define what’s fixed about a page that the audience will see. Templates provides the framework for the layout of the content, allowing other aspects of the content to adjust.
Layout has a subtle effect on how content is delivered and is accessed across different screens. Elements that are obvious on some screen sizes may not be so on other screen sizes — for example, a list of related articles, or a cross-promotion. Page templates must address how to make core information consistently available.
Content Types
Content types indicate what kinds of information and messages audiences need to see to satisfy their goals. The more specific the audience goal, the most specific the content type is likely to be. For example, many websites have an “article” content type that has only a few basic attributes, such as title, author and body. Such types aren’t associated with any specific goal. But a product profile on an e-commerce website will be much more specific, since different elements are important to satisfying user needs for them to decide to buy the product. The more specific a content type, the more similar each screen of content based on it will seem, even though the specific messages and information will vary. Content types provide consistency in the kinds of information presented for a given scenario.
Content types are designed for a specific audience who has a specific goal. It specifies: to support this purpose, this information must be presented. It answers: what elements of content needs to be delivered here for this scenario? One of the benefits of a content type is that it can provide options to show more details, fewer details, or different details, according to the audience and scenario.
Content types also encode business rules about the display of content. In doing so, they provide the logical structure of content. If the content model already has defined the specifics of required information, it can pre-populate the information — enabling the reuse of content elements.
Content Models
Content models indicate the elements of content that are available to support different audiences and scenarios. They specify the specific kinds of messages the publisher has planned to use across different content. They specify the semantic structure of the content — or put more simply, how different content elements are related to each other in their meaning.
Content is built from various kinds of messages associated with different topics and having different roles, such as extended descriptions, instructions, calls-to-action, value propositions, admonitions, and illustrations. The content model provides a overview of the different kinds of essential messages that are available to build different versions and variations of content.
In some respects, a content model is analogous to a site map. A site map provides external audiences and systems a picture of the content published on a website. A content model provides a map of the internal content resources that are available for publication. But instead of representing a tree of web pages like a site map, the content model presents constellation of “nodes” that indicate available information resources. A node is a basic unit of content that part of and connected to the larger structure of content. They correspond to a content elements within published content — the units of content described within a pair of HTML tags.
Each node in a content model represents a distinct unit of content covering a discrete message or statement of information. Nodes are connected to other nodes elsewhere. A node may be empty (authors can supply any message provided it relates to the expected meaning), or a node may be pre-populated with one or more values (indicating that the meaning will have a certain predefined message).
Content models connect nodes by identifying the relationships between them — how one element relates to another. It can show how different nodes are associated, such as what role one node has to another. For example, one node could be part of another node because is a detail relating to a larger topic. The relationships provide pathways between different nodes of content.
Content models are more abstract than other approaches to structuring content, and can therefore be open to wider interpretation about what they do. The content model represents perhaps the deepest level of content structure, capturing all reusable and variable content elements.
No single model, template or design system
No single representation of content structure can effectively depict all its different aspects. I haven’t seen any single view representation that supports the different kinds of design decisions required. For example, wireframes mix together fixed structures defined by templates with dynamic structures associated with UI design. When content is embedded within screen comps, it is hard to see which elements are fixed and which are fluid. Single views promote a tunnel focus on a specific decision, but block visibility into larger considerations that may be involved. I’ve seen various attempts to improve wireframes to make them more interactive and content-friendly, but the basic limitations remain.
Consider a simple content element: an alert that tells a customer that their subscription is expiring and that they need to submit new payment details. UI design needs to consider how the alert is delivered where it is noticed but not annoying. Content design needs to decide on whether to use an existing alert, or write a new one. The template must decide where within a page or screen the alert appears. The content type will specify the rules triggering delivery of the alert: who gets it, and when. And the content model may hold variations of the alert, and their mappings to different content types that use them. You need a better alert, but what do you need to change? What should stay the same, so you don’t mess up other things you’ve worked hard to get right?
Such decisions require coordination; different people may be responsible for different aspects. Not only must decisions and tasks be coordinated across people, they must be coordinated across time. Those involved need to be aware of past decisions, easily reuse these when appropriate, and be able to modify them when not. Agility is important, but so is governance.
A benefit of content structure is that it can accelerate the creation and delivery of content. The challenge of content structure is that it’s not one thing. There are different approaches, and each has its own value to offer. Web publishers have more tools than ever to solve specific problems. But they still need truly integrated platforms that help web teams coordinate different kinds of decisions relating to specifying and choosing content elements.
Two of the biggest themes in content these days are structured content, and storytelling. A number of people are suggesting the two approaches complement each other. For example, Robert Rose, a well-known promoter of content marketing, commented in a LinkedIn discussion: “It’s not just about tags, taxonomies and 1’s and the 0’s… And it’s not just about the storytelling, personas and buyer’s journey… It’s where those things — and most importantly people — meet that move the business forward.” The proposed combination of structured content with narrative has sparked both anticipation and uncertainties. Will it be transformational and game-changing, or a hornet’s nest of anguish?
Storytelling and factually oriented technical communication can potentially learn from each other. The structured content approaches associated with technical documentation enable content to scale up for use by many different people in different channels. The storytelling approaches embraced by the best content marketing and journalism, when backed by robust analytics, can enable content to be genuinely wanted by people, rather than just be minimally adequate.
Even if we have a solid rationale for trying to get the two concepts to work together, that doesn’t guarantee the effort will be successful or easy. How editorial structure (the framework behind storytelling) and content structure (the framework behind intelligent content) work together is still unclear. The two approaches are different in their origin and purpose, and anyone curious about how they might complement each other needs to understand their differences.
So far, there are few concrete examples of semantic content use in narratives. Many different kinds of issues are involved: technical, emotional, and pragmatic. It is hard to separate what’s visionary potential from what’s wishful thinking.
The potential of semantic content is linked to a number of foundational questions. These include:
What is the relationship between editorial structure, and the structure of content as understood by computers?
How far can stories be structured? To what extent does structured content support narrative?
How does structure support or hinder communication — the ability of people to understand on their own terms?
Is structure the same as modular reuse?
Can the modular content techniques developed for technical support documentation be readily applied to narrative-driven marketing collateral?
Besides presenting an intriguing goal, the topic holds larger significance. The proposition that semantic content and storytelling can be combined challenges the discipline of content strategy to examine its assumptions, and consider possibilities for innovation.
The Many Dimensions (and Guises) of Intelligent Content
Intelligent content is a term used to describe approaches for making content more intelligent to both audiences and the computers serving them. It is an umbrella term covering a range of different related concepts: structured content, modular content, atomic content and reusable content. Because there is significant overlap in these concepts, there can be a tendency to treat them as equivalent. On occasion we use these terms interchangeably, which in some contexts is appropriate. At the same time, there can be differences in meaning and nuance among these terms we should be aware of. As best I can tell, there is no consensus in the content strategy community defining these terms, and as a result, they are sometimes used in somewhat different ways. To me, the terms can suggest slightly different things:
Semantically structured content — how the structure of an article or episode affects its meaning, expressed through machine-readable metadata such as page section descriptions. For some people HTML5 offers semantic structure, for others, only XML is sufficient.
Modular content — chunks of content that can be assembled in different ways
Atomic content — the smallest meaningful unit of content
Reusable content — content that can be used multiple times in different contexts without any modification.
Consider how these terms can be used differently. Semantically structured content does not automatically imply modularity, where the content can be reassembled in a different way. You might use the semantic structure purely for SEO purposes, for example. Modular chunks of content are not necessarily the smallest meaningful units, which means that the chunks may not be completely repurpose-able. Modular content that is composed of a collection of atomic elements is not necessarily reusable content that permits the module can be used in diverse contexts.
How one thinks about these terms shapes one’s expectations for what capabilities they represent. Some of these concepts are too new or too fluid to have a well-established meaning. There is too much play in how they might be implemented to settle on their exact meaning and scope. Locking down precise definitions would be counterproductive.
Structure in Linear and Nonlinear Content
The content community has expressed a range of views about the extent to which structure is compatible with narrative content. It’s a thought provoking discussion because it touches on many core issues we grabble with.
One argument is that narrative content is different in character, and that narrative content cannot be reused. Deane Barker has written: “To effectively manage content down to the paragraph or sentence level and re-use them in extended narratives, you would have to make sure each one was completely self-contained and match the style, tone, and tense of everything before or after. This is not easy.” In response to this comment, Rahel Anne Bailie stated: “narrative isn’t one of the genres meant for any kinds of re-use.”
Another concern is that pre-defined structure inhibits narrative flow. Rick Yagodich writes in his book Author Experience that “the idea of narrative and structured content may appear to be at odds with each other. Structure puts up walls and determines boxes we need to fill-in, whereas narrative is a good story, a flow that adapts to the needs of the message being conveyed.”
On the other side, some journalists are exploring how to incorporate structure into journalistic content. Adrian Holovaty, a journalist-programmer, wrote an influential post on this topic in 2006. In it, he argued: “Newspapers need to stop the story-centric worldview. Repurposing and aggregating information is a different story, and it requires the information to be stored atomically — and in machine-readable format. A lot of the information that newspaper organizations collect is relentlessly structured.” He maintained: “But stories have structure — otherwise they are a torrent of associations that aren’t logically tied together.”
There have been several journalistic initiatives to put into practice Holovaty’s ideas of making the story flow out of a structure. The best known is Circa, which is based on the atomization of content. Each paragraph is a distinct unit of content. Circa differs from a lot of other storytelling through how it structures stories. The story is emergent, and based around time, so that it builds up over time as atoms are published.
The Continuum of Structure
I question the idea that there is a clean dichotomy between narrative content, and factual (descriptive or explanatory) content. It is true that some content, narrative especially, is predominately linear, while other content, for example an e-commerce catalog, is non-linear. But narrative does have structure, and factual content often implies stories.
Rather than seeing two genres, story and fact, one can identify many dimensions of structure across various genres. The below diagram shows how genres have common structures, and even different genres can have parallel structures.
Common structures for different content genres
What is common to many genres is a need
to set the context of a discussion
to establish the relevance to the reader
to give the reader points of comparison to other things she knows about already, or might want to learn more about
to satisfy a goal we assume the reader has
to provide a satisfying experience, so the reader will want more content from our source in the future
Why Editorial Structure Matters to Narrators
Editorial structure — how writers and editors arrange content to provide meaning to readers — is a topic that predates intelligent content by hundreds of years. Analog content with a strong editorial structure provides enormous intelligence for readers, even if computers can’t understand its nuances.
Semantically structured content is not the same as editorial structure. Consider a help guide. The below screen shot presents the help guide for one of the most popular XML tools intended for creating structured content. The content is minutely structured in XML. It can be read online, within the application itself, and as a PDF. It would seem a prime example of the benefits of structured content. But the content itself is barely usable. The content is fragmented. One cannot get a sense of the relationship among the information: there seems to be an endless list of links, some of which go to other lists of links. When the output of structured content is so unwelcoming for audiences, many writers are understandably hesitant to embrace structured content.
Screenshot of the help facility of an XML tool, generated using structured content. It is difficult to understand the relationship of the various content presented.
The reality is that many writers and editors feel stymied by attempts to impose structure on them. Jeff Eaton, a content developer who has worked with leading publishers, notes: “this doesn’t mean that editors and writers are content with rigid, predictable designs for the material they publish. This challenging requirement — providing editors and writers with more control over the presentation of their content — is where many well-intentioned content models break down.”
Editors and writers concerned with presentation want more than what is offered by a CSS style sheet. It is fundamental to their ability to communicate meaning to audiences — the deep meaning that storytelling content aims to deliver. Dismissing these concerns as unimportant or someone else’s problem won’t advance adoption and development of structured content. We need to appreciate and accommodate the vital function editorial structure plays.
Structure is More than Lexical
By some measures, editorial structure has become less robust with the rise of structured content. This trend was not inevitable. It reflects the absence of a central coordinating mechanism directing how audiences receive their content. The separation of content from presentation and from behavior often means that none of these things is centrally coordinated. The editor has gone missing in the action. A core weakness stems from treating structure as entirely lexical, and assuming metadata describing words and characters are the only factor enabling structure.
Rob Waller, an information designer and fellow at London’s Royal College of Art, laments how poor the narrative experience is for a digital product compared to a printed one. “The reader of the paper version can slip easily between related stories because cohesion within the set is provided graphically: their physical location, the typographic hierarchy, and visual genre distinctions all provide cohesion cues that in the Web version are absent or are entirely lexical.” He notes: “whatever their actual content, we tend to assume that things that are physically close on the page are related in some way (the proximity principle), and that things that look similar are members of the same category (the similarity principle).”
Waller praises what he calls “a golden age of layout, the 1970s and 1980s. Publishers such as Time-Life, Reader’s Digest, Dorling Kindersley, and others developed a new genre that, inspired by magazine design, used the double-page spread as a unit of meaning. The diagrammatic quality of these books – typically on hobbies, sports, history, or travel – brought layout to the fore. They were developed by multidisciplinary teams in much the same way as films are produced. Unlike the traditional book, in which the author’s voice is primary, in these books, the writer fills in spaces to order, and provides functional text such as descriptions and captions on request from editors, illustrators, photographers, and designers.”
To get a sense of how editorial structure supports narrative richness, let’s look at a couple of examples from Dorling Kindersley (DK) guides I own. The first, from a guide to the Italian region of Umbria, presents a map of a park with associated commentary to let the reader choose their physical (or vicarious) adventure: a visit to Roman ruins, a medieval village, a summit or a cave. The page spread shows a wide range of content: introductory explanation, the map itself, symbols on the map indicating various types of places, pictures of some of the places with a pointer to where they are, description of places with a pointer to where they are, and a sidebar of related information about wildlife in the park. What makes the narrative rich is that it seamlessly integrates all kinds of different information types into one narrative, the story of a park.
This guidebook spread integrates many information types into a cohesive presentation. Readers can choose their personal interests: perhaps paragliding, or visiting paleolithic ruins.
For a very different example of editorial structure, we will look at a DK guide to the opera. Opera is an archetypal form of storytelling, so it’s interesting to see how a narrative that’s long, complex, and multifaceted can be condensed into its essence in an engaging way. The discussion of the opera Tosca has a wealth of structured content, but unlike much XML generated content, the structure doesn’t assault the reader. There are information boxes with key facts about the opera performance (duration, dates of composition and first performance, librettist and sources), and the principle roles. But the interesting structure comes from the presentation of the story itself. Operas are structured stories, and within each act are highlights, especially the major songs. The songs are indicated at the exact point in the story they are sung with an indication of their type (aria, duet, or ensemble), and the key line from the song in a call out. There are also images and sidebars relating to notables performances of the opera. Again in this example, the editorial structure leads to a planned and integrated presentation of content.
Structured content supports the telling of an operatic story.
Reuse Isn’t Monolithic
What is different about the examples from the guidebooks is that the content structure seems primarily aimed at supporting audience needs, rather than reducing the burden to the publisher. As someone who has used DK guides for many years, I am aware they use structure to reuse content across different products, and to revise their guides. But the structure doesn’t appear to the enduser to be an efficiency measure. Rather, it seems natural, because the elements are so well integrated.
Reuse is not the only benefit of structure. Focusing on reuse obsessively can result in overly complicated and unworkable solutions. We need to evaluate reuse from an editorial perspective, not just a publishing productivity one.
Content elements often have cross-dependencies. Cross-dependencies are a good thing, even though they create challenges. Elements offer value in relation to what they are presented with — the meaning can be based on the cross-dependency. The integration of different elements in a thoughtful manner yields larger meaning.
We like to think we can easily rearrange pieces of content to create different content. But the pieces have cross-dependencies, and need to arranged in a precise way. This puzzle, which I bought at a Munich Christmas market, looks simple, but is in fact tricky.
The discussion of reuse can often be monolithic, looking to reuse everything, instead of selectively reusing items in the context of content that is not intended to be reusable. When viewed from an editorial perspective, the chief benefits of reuse are to ensure accuracy when precision is essential, and to enable the combination of items in truly novel ways that bring value to audiences, rather than simply provide a minor variation.
Difference between Macrostructure and Microstructure
All structure is not the same, even when it is semantically marked up. Some structures describe many things at once; other structures describe very specific items of information. Discussing structure as a single abstract concept can cause us to overlook important differences.
Macrostructure is high-level structure that is common to a content type. It provides the descriptive elements of what is being discussed. Suppose the content deals with bird identification. Most bird field guides have similar sections: name, identifying physical characteristics, behaviors such as feeding and nesting, habitat, voice calls, and range.
Microstructure is concerned with details and facts. They are often the variables within a content type, and may be marked up using a standardized schema. They identify people, places, things and quantities.
We know in many areas of life that a thing is often more than the sum of its parts — described by a scientist who pioneered the theory of the constructive emergence of hierarchies as “more is different.” We need to understand what’s different about complex content structures.
What Bird-watching Can Teach Us About Content Structure
Birds are things in the real world that are classified with exactness. Long before librarians thought to use taxonomies to classify content, naturalists developed the concept of taxonomies to classify birds and other living things. One might think that birds are a topic were one can “roll-up” specific facts about a type of bird to develop larger chunks of content about them. The challenge is that the facts about birds don’t necessarily define what they are. They simply are indicators. A recent book on learning (Make it Stick) notes: “To identify a bird’s family, you consider a wide range of traits like size, plumage, behavior, location, beak shape, iris color, and so on. A problem in bird identification is that members of a family share many traits in common but not all.” It adds: “Because rules for classification can only rely on these characteristic traits rather than on defining traits (ones that hold for every member), bird classification is a matter of learning concepts and making judgments, not simply memorizing features.”
The story of a bird is more than the facts about it: it involves communicating a concept. The difference between concepts and facts is the difference between macrostructure and microstructure. Stories are made from both macrostructure and microstructure.
Functions of Editorial Structure
Does the content look as if it was constructed by a database? Much structured content is not very good hiding its piecemeal origins. And unfortunately editorial structure can’t be faked by asking your CSS expert to create a style sheet that magically makes disparate pieces of content seem like they belong together. Editorial structure is a more comprehensive concept than font sizes and cell padding.
Where the tagging of microstructure has been motivated by search, and content reuse, the role of macrostructure is different. Macrostructure supports how people interact with content, a major focus of editorial structure. Editorial structure performs a curatorial role: showcasing topics (what things have in common, showing examples) and themes (comparing aspects).
Macrostructure supports way-finding. Consider the reader’s journey. They come from other content to this content. What do they do next? Get more details? Look for related content? Take action on the content? Good content has a take-away. Editorial structure supports that. It defines the purpose of the assembled content, while microstructure has no inherent purpose – it can be used in various situations.
The danger to narrative content is that the emphasis on smaller units of content can result in a poor narrative experience. The issue isn’t so much whether atomic content is compatible with narrative, but how rich a narrative experience one can develop building from atomic content.
Finding the Relationships Among the Pieces
As we have become more analytical about our content, and seek to bring more transparency to the tacit judgments of editors, we can become overwhelmed by the enormity of detail we face. Suddenly things that make sense on an intuitive level seem bewildering when exposed in minutia.
While the mechanics of intelligent content are important, it is equally important to understand how these can serve audience needs and create impact. To do this, we need to appreciate how audiences experience content through patterns and storytelling devices.
Authors and editors use various techniques to guide the reader. They emphasize different aspects of content. The below chart summarizes how the choices that authors and editors make (the center two columns) can address audience needs.
Editorial structure is what ties together intelligent content to audience experiences
On the left side are tactics from the toolkit of intelligent content. The task is to choose appropriate tactics to support the goals of authors and editors. Moving from left to right, each column has building blocks that support items to the right. The building books culminate in experiences for audiences. Conversely, starting with the needs of audiences, we can design experiences for them by building structure into content as we move toward columns on the left.
Structure is Semantic, but also Visual and Behavioral
Meaning is bigger than how something is described. It consists of implicit dimensions: perceptions and behavioral experience over time.
Perceptions are often visual, though they could be auditory, or haptic. Visual design addresses issues like gestalt, continuation, and picture— word interactions that influence our interpretation of content. We know from eye tracking that layout has a significant impact on how content is perceived and understood. It is not simply a cosmetic thing. The term stylesheet, while a powerful concept, can falsely suggest that visual design is no more than paint-by-numbers coloration of a canvas.
Behavioral structure is a combination of interaction design (setting up how users can explore available content) and algorithmic design (the computer deciding what order and sequence of content to present).
Visuals and experiences in time are themselves information. They shape how people feel about something as much as words do. A photo accompanying an article can dramatically shape how a reader feels about the subject. The pacing of interaction can shape how exciting or precious something seems.
We can’t allow the notion of “presentation independent” content to devolve into “experience free” content. We need to be able to describe the feelings we want our content to convey, wherever it appears.
Semantic Markup Needs Human Judgment
There is sometimes a tendency to treat semantic markup as some sort of objective reality that people uncover for the benefit of computers. This view ignores the subjective character of much semantic markup, which is essential to conveying meaning. If semantic markup doesn’t apply judgments of humans, it is probably superficial and will be limited in what it can accomplish.
Going back to our discussion of birds. A species doesn’t just represent a series of tagged data; it represents a concept, an idea. There was a judgment made on how to classify the bird. Higher level structure involves judgments, which though subjective, are shared by wide numbers of people.
Like editorial structure, semantics aren’t purely lexical. People infer semantics through context and presentation. They perceive semantic elements as having boundaries, identities, and hierarchies. Boundaries express the aboutness of the section, which can vary in explicitness and in uniformity. Identities may be implied, rather than explicitly named. Hierarchies must be understood to matter.
Semantic markup is not simply what is explicitly described: it is meant to capture what people interpret when they see see (or hear) the content. The folks who understand this best are those working in the digital humanities using an XML schema called TEI. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) defines markup as “any means of making explicit an interpretation of a text… it is a process of making explicit what is conjectural or implicit, a process of directing the user as to how the content of the text should be (or has been) interpreted.” TEI uses XML to structure content to convey the meaning represented by the layout and other presentational dimensions of content. “The physical appearance of one particular printed or manuscript source may be of importance: paradoxically, one may wish to use descriptive markup to describe presentational features such as typeface, line breaks, use of whitespace and so forth.”
TEI uses metadata to describe appearance. We can similarly use metadata to express preferred presentation.
Karen McGrane has wisely counseled that “we can’t rely on visual cues” to convey semantic information. She says this because our content by necessity must be ready to be multi-channel and multi-media, and we can’t presume to know how it will appear, exactly. But that doesn’t mean we should not use visual cues, if they are available to use. Presentation independence doesn’t mean presentation is not relevant.
Unfortunately most metadata today is exclusively literal. When used to describe legacy content, it tends to strip out meaning that is implied in the context in which it sits. When used to describe new content, it denies authors the ability to indicate the preferred context in which it might appear. We need to find ways to enhance metadata with contextual cues, so that it can convey more meaning.
While we may not be able to predict all the forms in which our content may appear, we need to think about content holistically, not just atomically. Semantic markup should not only define boundaries, but suggest possible linkages to other semantic elements.
Making Structured Content More Narrative-Friendly
I am cautiously optimistic that semantic structure can support the development and delivery of narrative content — stories in various forms that audiences will enjoy and act on. The technical challenges are solvable. If we are to believe the view that rich narrative is the best way to gain audience attention at a time when content is too plentiful and too generic, then monetary incentive to move in this direction is present. But we won’t get there relying on existing approaches. I don’t see the DITA toolkit favored by technical writers as supporting narrative content.
To enable structure to support narrative, we need to stretch our abilities in three key areas:
Broadening our concept of narrative
Broadening our concept of metadata structure
Broadening our toolset
Broadening our concept of narrative
For all the interest and excitement surrounding storytelling, people often hold a surprisingly narrow view of what a story is. For many people, a story is a plot-driven, hero-centric tale. They equate stories with the template used by Hollywood blockbusters, the hero’s journey pattern so often recycled by the advertising industry. But stories can take many forms, and be experienced in many ways.
Stories are any content that offers a vicarious experience. The key ingredient is that people experience something: they are involved with the content. It could be interacting with a map or a timeline, composing a plan with images, or immersing oneself in a podcast. None of these things is necessarily a story, but each of them could be. The test is asking someone what he or she did today. If they mention your content, it left a memorable impression. If they remark on some aspect that meant something to them, it indicates they experienced something using your content.
Scope is another story dimension. We tend to think about content as narrative, or non-narrative. But it is possible to have story elements embedded in non-narrative content. One can imagine mini-stories consisting of swappable, targeted anecdotes or case studies included in a longer body of content. It’s harder to produce an experience with a short piece of content, but if appropriately targeted to be personally relevant to the audience, it could improve how audiences relate to the content.
Broadening Our Concept Of Metadata
In addition to adding element metadata, we need to expand the use of metadata describing the attributes of the elements. If structured content is to really going to engage audiences, instead of being just more dross they have to cope with, the structure needs to reflect what is engaging about it. The success of semantically enriched content narratives will be judged and measured by the concrete impact they achieve.
Metadata needs to capture the big ideas behind the content: to indicate how we want audiences to interpret a section of content. Rather than simply indicating an “overview section,” the metadata needs to indicate what’s different about this overview section compared to others. As mentioned earlier, metadata for more complex, higher level content objects could capture more subjective, conceptual qualities, describing the fuzzier aspects of “aboutness”. Just because a quality is fuzzy (non tangible and more difficult to describe) doesn’t mean the concept isn’t real or is unimportant. When describing subjective qualities, the standard to use is intersubjective agreement: when multiple people describe a quality in similar ways (even if the exact term each uses differs). This metadata will provide valuable clues about appropriate usage of the content in different situations. I offered one idea for such an application in my CS Forum talk last year on content attractors, but there are many other applications possible.
In addition to capturing aboutness, attribute metadata should also provide clues about the compatibility of the content chunk with other chunks. Imagine you had a press release about an unfortunate event at your organization — a fire perhaps. You note that CEO expressed his concern for the well being of people evacuated from your facility. And the press release is accompanied by a photo of the CEO — who is smiling. Photos can have a tone, but photo metadata often doesn’t capture that. Compatibility metadata relates to any editorial aspects that indicate what items tend to work well together, or should be avoided using together. Perhaps some pull-quotes of testimonials should not be used in certain contexts: attribute metadata could indicate that.
How values are described is another aspect of metadata that can be enhanced to improve storytelling capabilities. We tend to treat the value as a literal word that will be used everywhere. Multilingual content shows us that it is not the word describing the value that’s important, it’s what the value represents. We may call the first month of the year January, but it can be called many other things, depending on the language. This same idea of separating values from the expression of values can be applied elsewhere. A place can be represented by a name, geographic coordinates, or a dot on a map. We might label an entity type on a screen using a word, an icon, or a color. Enabling expressive fluency, where the same semantically described idea can be expressed multiple ways in different contexts, will be important to developing rich narratives using intelligent content.
Broadening Our Toolkit
Stories have structure, but that structure sometimes needs to be more flexible than used for strictly factual content to accommodate a range of expression. Content management tools need to provide more editorial control over structure. Cookie cutter templates make all content look the same, and dull the experience. You can see this on Medium, where the US President’s State of the Union address looks similar to a posting by your neighbor’s college age kid. The recent example of the Washington Post’s PageBuilder points to a possible model for giving editors more control over the structure of the content.
Narrative authors will use semantic content differently than technical communicators do. The tools need to reflect these differences. Stories won’t be generated directly by databases. Rather, authors will use semantic content to identify appropriate content to use in different contexts. The process will change from enforced content reuse to elective reuse. Semantic content will empower the author to find what’s available and appropriate, and create an option to include it where it can work. The goal should be to use intelligent content to empower an editor, rather than to replace an editor, to use databases to reflect curatorial decisions, rather than making those choices.
Finally, little progress will be realized until the tools for structured content become easier and more pleasant to use. That is a very big challenge given that some dimensions of content will be need to be defined in even more detail than they are today, and today’s semantic content tools are completely unacceptable to creative writers who write narrative. Again, this a solvable issue; it just hasn’t been anyone’s priority. While everyone agrees in principle that the UX of content management is ghastly, I see few people cite poor UX as a major barrier to the adoption of semantically structured content. Those who advocate using structured content for narrative, but who have largely mastered these tools already, may be unaware of, or underestimate, this chasm.
Closing Thoughts
Whether or not storytelling incorporates semantic content, and whether or not any such changes happen in the near future, the topic prompts the content strategy community to think deeply about how we approach our craft, and how it can be extended. There is great potential, and many challenges to be solved.
