Collation

A key part of Information Architecture is logically organising content, which is referred to as collation; to do so, you need to know when to arrange something alphabetically, chronologically, or by some other order. Context is a key part of deciding the order of a list; even when organising something alphabetically, there’s ambiguity as to what goes where. Take the following list as an example:

ASCII Code Chart

• El Paso, Texas
• Saint Nicholas, Belgium
• The Lord of the Rings
• Newark, New Jersey
• XVIIme siècle
• .38 Special
• St. Louis, Missouri
• New York, New York
• 1001 Arabian Nights
• The 1-2-3 of Magic
• Albany, New York
• #!%&: Creating Comic Books
• The Hague, Netherlands
• $35 a Day Through Europe
• H20: The Beauty of Water
• Plzen, Czech Republic

There are some things to think about when ordering a list alphabetically:

• Should you put ‘The Hague’ under ‘T’ or ‘H’? Typically, you would omit words like ‘The’ or ‘A’ when ordering a list, but in this case it’s a part of the name and so should probably be included.
• Likewise, would ‘El Paso’ be under ‘E’ or ‘P’? ‘El’ is Spanish for ‘The’, so it should probably be treated similarly. Normally, it'd be omitted, but again, it’s part of the name; people likely wouldn’t search for ‘Paso’ when they mean ‘El Paso’.
• A more difficult question is whether to put New York before Newark. Does the space count as a character? Alphabetically, not counting spaces or capitals, ‘Newark’ would come first. However, the order would probably depend on the context; if I were enumerating a list of places in the world, doing it by hand would be time-consuming, so I would probably be using some kind of automated process. As such, I would probably use some character set such as ASCII; in ASCII, both the space and ‘Y’ come before ‘a’, so ‘New York’ would come first.
• Does ‘St.’ come before or after ‘Saint’? ‘St.’ is an abbreviation of ‘Saint’, so should they be ordered as the same word? It’s hard to decide, and again depends on the context. I would probably order ‘St’ as ‘Saint’, as uniformity is key in organisation. As such, St. Louis would come before Saint Nicholas.
• How are numbers, punctuation and special characters handled? What’s their order? Are they counted at all? I would use the characters’ ASCII values; that way, I could write a program to alphabetise the list for me.

Having considered all of this, here is my interpretation of the alphabetised list:

• #!%&: Creating Comic Books
• $35 a Day Through Europe
• .38 Special
• 1001 Arabian Nights
• Albany, New York
• El Paso, Texas
• H20: The Beauty of Water
• New York, New York
• Newark, New Jersey
• Plzen, Czech Republic
• St. Louis, Missouri
• Saint Nicholas, Belgium
• The 1-2-3 of Magic
• The Hague, Netherlands
• The Lord of the Rings
• XVIIme siècle

If the italic elements are books and the rest places, the list could be separated to display the different context between the elements. Moreover, if the places are those which I’ve visited, and the books are those which I’ve read, chronology could be used to order the list(s). Chronologically ordering the lists would let you see at a glance what happened most recently, what's happened furthest in the past, and the order of events. This would reduce the ambiguity inherent with alphabetisation and would also give a personal meaning to the list.

There are more rigid and uniform methods of alphabetisation; this document details a technical standard for Unicode collation.