 An interesting topic in data sourcing, when you're making data is card sorting. Now, this isn't something that comes up very often in academic research, but in web research, this can be a really important method. Think of it as what you're trying to do is like building a model of a molecule here, you're trying to build a mental model, or a model of people's mental structures. But more specifically, how do people organize information intuitively? And also, how does that relate to the things that you're doing online? Now, the basic procedure goes like this, you take a bunch of little topics, and you write each one on a separate card. And you can do this physically with like three by five cards, or there's a lot of programs that allow you to do a digital version of it. Then what you do is you give this information to a group of respondents and the people sort those cards. So they put similar topics with each other, different topics over here and so on. And then you take that information. And from that, you're able to calculate what's called dissimilarity data. Think of it as like the distance, or the difference between various topics. And that gives you the raw data to analyze how things are structured. Now, there are two very general kinds of card sorting tasks. They're generative, and there's evaluative. A generative card sorting task is one in which respondents create their own sets, their own piles of cards, using any number of groupings they like. And this might be used, for instance, to design a website. If people are going to be looking for one kind of information next to another one, then you want to put that together on the website so they know where to expect it. On the other hand, if you've already created a website, then you can do an evaluative card sorting. This is where you have a fixed number or fixed names of categories, like for instance, the way you've set up your menus already. And then what you do is you see if people naturally put the cards into these various categories that you've created. That's a way of verifying that your hierarchical structure makes sense to people. Now, whichever method you do, generative or evaluative, what you end up with when you do a card structure is an interesting kind of visualization is called a dendrogram. That actually means branches. And what we have here is actually 150 data points. If you're familiar with the Fisher's Iris data, that's what's going on here. And it groups it from one giant group on the left and then splits it in pieces and pieces and pieces until you end up with lots of different observe, well, actually individual level observations at the end, but you can cut things off into two or three groups or wherever it's most useful for you here, as a way of visualizing the entire collection of similarity or dissimilarity between the individual pieces of information that you had people sort. Now, I'll just mention very quickly, if you want to do digital card sorting, which makes your life infinitely easier because keeping track of physical cards is really hard. You can use something like optimal workshop, or user zoom or UX suite. These are some of the most common choices. Now, let's just sum up what we've learned about card sorting in this extremely brief overview. Number one, card sorting allows you to see intuitive organization of information in a hierarchical format. You can do it with physical cards, or you also have digital choices for doing the same thing. And when you're done, you actually get this hierarchical or branched visualization of how the information is structured and related to each other.