Monica's jeans

Beyond borders

2012-01-16T11:34:00.000Z

European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), ECIS 2013, June 5-8, Utrecht University, Utrecht Science Park 'de Uithof':

"The transition to a more inter-dependent and connected world is ongoing, and offers up a range of new complex research challenges. A further challenge is that the way research is conducted is changing and requires greater collaboration between researchers, as well as between researchers and industry, to integrate capabilities to face today’s challenges.

(...)

“Beyond Borders”. It suggests having an open mind towards new ways of doing research and establishing novel partnerships for conducting research. It also refers to the multi-disciplinary nature of the field of Information Systems where we often work outside IS and collaborate with researchers in diverse disciplines."

infrastructure of experience

2011-11-21T15:02:00.001Z

P. Dourish & G. Bell (2007). The infrastructure of experience and the experience of infrastructure: meaning and structure in everyday encounters with space. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, vol. 34(3), pp.414-430:

"By 'the experience of infrastructure', we point to the ways in which infrastructure, rather than being hidden from view, becomes visible through our increasing dependence upon it for the practice of everyday life. By 'the infrastructure of experience', we want to draw attention to the ways in which, in turn, the embedding of a range of infrastructures into everyday space shapes our experience of that space and provides a framework through which our encounters with space take on meaning. (...) The first, and most fundamental, conclusion is that space is organized not just physically but culturally; cultural understandings provide a frame for encountering space as meaningful and coherent, and for relating it to human activities. (...) The second conclusion is that architecture is all about boundaries and transitions, and their intersection with human and social practice. (...) The third conclusion is that new technologies inherently cause people to reencounter spaces. This is not a question of mediation, but rather one of simultaneous layering. (...) Finally, there is already a complex interaction between space, infrastructure, culture, and experience. The spaces into which new technologies are deployed are not stable, not uniform, and not given."

silence

2011-11-17T20:15:00.001Z

Star, S. L., Bowker, G., (2007). Enacting silence: Residual categories as a challenge for ethics, information systems, and communication. Ethics and Information Technology, vol.9, pp. 273-280:

"Experience doesn't come raw, but it comes in real time, in wildness, and not in anyone s direct control. Responding to experience means letting generalization and speciﬁcity be in dialectic in our writings and in our biographies. And this in turn means resistance –to pressures for conformity and towards the uniform voice (although there are sometimes ethical reasons for presenting a united front )."

Harmonia

2011-11-09T10:18:00.000Z

Há dias mais pesados,

but in the middle,

I'm allowed to laugh.

MonicaP

2011/Nov/9

timelapse(s)

2011-10-25T15:28:00.001+01:00

While watching the video shared by a friend, which shows motion trough stillness [timelapse using pixelization], recalled the work of Kakihara's, and his conceptualization of mobility...

Back to writing, thinking on the duality of the mobility concept [fluidity needs stability, Pica & Kakihara (2003)], and going trough the visual timelines of information collected from participants since 2007. Building an argument for showing the relation between transitions and the dance of artefacts used by the actors for articulation work [Star], in situated actions [Suchman] across time, and persistent myths/asumptions about the information society. Unfolding layers of slow methods [methods assemblage / ethnography of infrastructure] across time [images/descriptions/fieldnotes/reflexivity], and confronting with accessible and available encountered research work... and all things that come to me and that are dificult to ignore [serendipity, Merton & Barber].

[Note to self: discuss interoperability and information mobility; connecting layers of IS, IT, ICT, artefacts' use and the social life of information]

Distance (still) matters! a)

2011-10-17T13:30:00.000+01:00

Follow up on the related myth that «distance is dead», in a paper by Petra Sonderegger (2009) in R&D working context across disperse teams in project work. Creating Shared Understanding in Research Across Distance: Distance Collaboratiion across Cultures in R&D. In e-Research: Transformation in Scholarly Practice:

"In summary, shared understanding and the flow of tacit knowledge are key elements of innovative collaboration; and trust, shared context, and frequent interactions (both formal and informal) are central to establishing these elements. Despite proclamations of the “death of distance” (Cairncross, 1997), physical presence and shared space are still important in today’s world, especially for people who are highly interdependent and faced with ambiguous situations. This study was designed to explore the potential and the limitations of distance collaboration in R&D, given the communication tools available.(...)For the researchers in this study, in-person meetings led to a higher level of comfort in collaboration. They trusted their counterparts more and moved the relationship from a purely professional level to a more personal level; they made fewer negative attributions in situations of uncertainty. An increase in spontaneity and a decrease in formality helped overcome some difficulties in distance communication."

a) Note to self: see another post with same title, and follow tag «distance».

About «completion suggestions»

2011-09-29T15:41:00.002+01:00

Trying out the new feature «completion suggestions» from blogger. Strange feeling of having a ghost shadow trying to guess what I'm going to type next. Don't know what's behind this feature but some thoughts on using it come to mind.

What if I was to choose not a word editor to write down the narrative of my thesis, but instead choose to use blogger compose? Would the shadow adapt to my writing style? Wouldn't it be great if it could also relate to all the stuff I've previously wrote/mention/annotate in here? Things like suggesting to cite a paper that I've read back in 2003 and somehow left it buried in my cite.u.like/librarything/post?

All in all it's quicker to write cause, since english is not my mother tongue, it becames easier to get the next word in place. Think a lot of people might be using this already but : ) It can even improve my writing skills. For once, I can have the write spelling before I finnish the word, instead of writing the word to realize that the red line beneath it means I have to go back to click on it, see suggestions and then choose the one I think I want, and then click again enter or go back and re-write the word in : )

Yes, think I'll be using it a little more to see how I feel.

[Notes to self] past seen in present

2011-08-08T19:46:00.001+01:00

This image was taken on January 30, 2006. It depicts 2 notebooks, still unwritten at that time. The larger one (on the bottom) was to be my research «Notebook 1» that was used between March 24, 2006 and July 30, 2007. The smaller one (closed and on top of the other) came to be my «Notebook 2.1» and it was used between October 2007 and June 2008.

The first notebook was my choice and followed my requisites of notebooks (plain pages where I can make scrapnotes, anywhere). The second was a gift from someone who knew I used notebooks. At the time I took the picture, besides loving the gift, I taught it was to small to take my notes. Also it had lines, instead of plain white pages like the one's all my notebooks previously had.

At that same time, I was not able to understand how it was going to play a part in a future that was yet to came. By the time I start using it, I was going through a life disruption. Being so small allowed me to have it among the few things I carried in a time where I had no permanent place to settle. During that time, this small notebook was mainly used as a «place» to collect housing possibilities, names of people and phone numbers, notes of houses for sale, notes of visits to houses, to-do lists, on going negotiations with lawyer, job searches, notes of contacts with banks, and a few notes on trying to get back to research work amidst a faulty infrastructure for working on the move [relate stability for mobility from the work of Kakihara].

The small notebook details pieces with clues to find «infrastructure» needed for getting a shelter and doing work. Rare exceptions in this notebook describe research design, like the entry on November 5, 2007, where I found the sketch drawing attention to the need of finding information artefacts crossing information spaces, by describing my own practices and behaviours, aka bias. This would call for slow methods. The kind of methods that would allow «seeing» what's not present [absent artefacts]. And that requires time. A long time collecting and long time going through it over and over again, «listening» to what the recordings tell us.

Paper demand response

2011-07-27T14:16:00.000+01:00

For long I've been a subscriber of alerts from the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN). Today I've received an email informing me of another service they are offering resulting from requests from both authors and readers:

"In response to requests from authors and readers to purchase printed and bound hard copies of papers on SSRN, we provide a 'Purchase Bound Hard Copy' service for most free PDF files in SSRN's eLibrary." FAQ

Clearly an(other) argument to build upon the affordances of paper beyond all the digital offerings available and being built that shows market demand for paper products.

Just yesterday another argument crossed my information spaces. In short, Paula Simões compared the consumer costs associate with buying a paper Book versus buying an eBook with DRM (Digital Rights Management). Albeit the immediate cost of acquisition favouring the eBook, after the purchase the costs are much higher for the eBook then for the paper Book. Those costs, besides the need to have additional artefacts to actually decode and read the product (eReader, computer, etc), concern social factors and even use factors. While we can lend books to our friends, sell them in second hand markets, and even leave them to our family or donate them to libraries, eBooks with DRM do not allow such affordances. And this is no minor issue. The original post as receive a lot of other comments that are adding layers of costs associated with DRM (you can use the google translate if Portuguese is a barrier).

Thing is, most of us do not have the required time to undergo an exhaustive study of all our artefacts restrictions so things like DRM might go unnoticed for quiet a long time... until the day we realize by self experience or by reading about others' experiences, that DRM restricts the social behaviour of sharing information by restricting the product to a specific artefact and only for the person who acquire it.

Am I missing something or this is one more point in favour of good old paper? Since people are talking way beyond their geographic limitations, will people keep on paying for eBooks with DRM? Seems that in Portugal, two large national editors are going to have to rethink their product restrictions policies.

assembling Talk to Me

2011-07-22T17:56:00.000+01:00

Image: notebooks with fieldnotes (taken by self).

Assembling narratives in research work are quiet extraordinary. A monumental task that very often is dismissed from the final thesis object. Encountering research work which accommodates the assembling stage of work is no easy task, yet we are surrounded by work-in-progress, messy processes, until we crystallize our deliverable products (aka, thesis). But like the fading boundaries between work and leisure, so are multidisciplinary boundaries. The interwoven net of objects and people gives the canvas for the playground where different actors' establish their agency, across time and (dis)place, allowing us to (de)construct (new) affordances for artefacts in interdependent layers of infrastructure.

"Talk to Me is an exhibition on the communication between people and objects that will open at The Museum of Modern Art [MoMa] on July 24th 2011. It will feature a wide range of objects from all over the world, from interfaces and products to diagrams, visualizations, perhaps even vehicles and furniture, by bona-fide designers, students, scientists, all designed in the past few years or currently under development. As you can tell, our net is cast very wide and the exhibition happens at the end of a long hunting and gathering exercise. This online journal will document the process and progress of Talk to Me. This is where we will share our findings, considerations, and explorations as we research, investigate, travel and hear from our networks of designers, artists, scientists and scholars."

Depending on one's own ability to read the surroundings, as much as to communicate a coherent chain of arguments, the thesis appears as a final product made to convince peers that we are ready for the passage. All the travelling reduced to words that account for a flow that's still moving beyond those words. A reality in motion which, as researchers, we have to accept we will no longer follow. At some point we freeze the arguments and the sequence of events becomes the ability to narrate the choosen facts in a discretionary way (structure), as long as we follow the rules. This rules are the methods, codes of conduct and trust agreements in use among the scientific community.

"Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?", oath taken by witnesses [jurados] in USA court rooms.

But the rules do not account for what is left unsaid. If you look again to Talk to Me, journalling (or documenting, if you prefer), give a richer account of the journey that can better elucidate how we came from point A to point 2 and are an example of the need to document the process in as much as inscribing it in the account of the process, so as to admit debate, collection and reflection before closure [people shifting from observed objects, to participants, to actors in the research work].

Are we not to give such an account that other researchers can re-construct our journey so they in turn can de-construct the argument? Methods become an accepted legitimizing tool in which one as to frame convincing arguments that can be trusted in order to evaluate the merit of the narrative. If so, why is it so hard to find thesis describing all the dead ends, the failed routes, the bad choices, the fear, the anguish, the whereabouts of everything that did not work? Isn't that the correct and exempt description that would allow verifiability? Was it not the (after) journey (immersion) that one followed that led us to those conclusions? Had we taken a different turn (choice), would we still reach the same conclusions?

Photo slides of notebooks across research: what are they Talk(ing) to Me?

Hard time deciding on colliding rules that govern science... let alone my English skills (un) improvements [note to self: write narrative in language not native to self - translation/meaning/nuance errors; write in one's language - barriers to feedback/localization]! Any actions/ideas of what cold help me stick to writing my argument (aka thesis) bringing the spiral to an halt?

maravilhosa inquietude

2011-04-07T14:54:00.003+01:00

Atenta ao que se vai passando, não querendo saber mais sobre a pensão de alimentos que há 3 anos está em falta, é maravilhoso e inquietante ao mesmo tempo, ouvir uma filha falar em arranjar trabalho para poder prosseguir os seus estudos. Maravilhoso, porque escolheu ficar com quem lhe explicou que detinha menores rendimentos para lhe permitir algo mais que o básico. Inquietante, porque me revisito e sei a disciplina que é necessária para abarcar a vida profissional e os estudos ao mesmo tempo. Não tinha que ser assim mas a vida tem que ser construída, a cada dia, com o que se tem e não com o que se devia ter.

quote

2011-03-24T20:20:00.001Z

"Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now." V. Woolf

Role of paper in disruptions

2011-03-16T15:26:00.000Z

"People check a posted list of survivors at an evacuation center in Miyagi prefecture's Natori city on Monday, March 14." from CNN

We are well aware of the great uses that information technologies and social networks supported by internet connections have been playing in the last years. Yet, we tend to minimize the role played by paper in times of great disruptions, like the one Japan is going through.

Visions of single information space

2011-03-03T12:53:00.003Z

Tom Heath and Christian Bizer (2011) Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space (HTML edition). Synthesis Lectures on the Semantic Web: Theory and Technology, 1:1, 1-136. Morgan & Claypool:

"The World Wide Web has enabled the creation of a global information space comprising linked documents. (...) Linked Data provides a publishing paradigm in which not only documents, but also data, can be a first class citizen of the Web, thereby enabling the extension of the Web with a global data space based on open standards - the Web of Data."

"Just as hyperlinks in the classic Web connect documents into a single global information space, Linked Data enables links to be set between items in different data sources and therefore connect these sources into a single global data space."

Indústria do Papel

2011-03-02T20:54:00.000Z

from CEPI

Na Europa, CEPI (Confederation of European Paper Industries) nas Preliminary Stats for 2010 registam aumentos, comparativamente a 2009, apesar da situação macroeconómica. Para estatísticas específicas de papel destinado a impressão, ver CEPIPRINT (Association of European Publication Paper Producers) e CEPIFINE (Confederation of European Fine Paper Industries).

Em portugal, CELPA (Associação da Indústria Papeleira) Boletim Estatístico 2009 (Setembro, 2010) os dados reportados a 2009, registaram aumento da produção em Portugal:

"Em 2009 a produção europeia de pastas para papel desceu 13,5%, sendo Portugal o 4º maior produtor europeu de pasta – com 7,1% do total – e o 3º maior produtor de pastas químicas – com 8,9% de produção. Relativamente à produção de papel, também a Europa viu a sua produção baixar 10,4%, sendo Portugal o 11º maior produtor europeu de papel e cartão – com 1,8% do total - e o 2º maior produtor de papel fino não revestido (UWF) – com 11,6% da produção total." (p.18)

"Neste contexto, em 2009 as empresas portuguesas produtoras de pasta e de papel conseguiram registar um aumento da produção de pastas virgens de 7,9%. (...) Apesar das quebras sentidas, com impacte directo na Rendibilidade das Vendas, que diminuiu de 10,2%, em 2008, para 7,0%, em 2009, o sector está a adaptar-se às mudanças dos mercados e acredita no seu potencial de crescimento a médio/longo prazo." (p.18-19)

Pena que na PORDATA não tenham dados sobre a produção de papel. Faltam-me também aqui estatísticas em termos globais que permitam ter uma noção do consumo de papel ao longo dos anos.

Opening the source(s) with blogs in research practices

2011-02-28T13:02:00.000Z

By the time I've started my PhD, I had already used blogs as a research tool for conducting research work, since 2003 [master's degree in Information Studies] not so much as a fieldwork tool, but as a way of registering trails of the research (ongoing information, readings, questions, doubts, ...) that allowed others to find me and, in turn, due to explicit (comments in blog) or implicit (link back, web bookmarks, citations) conversations allowed me to find them.

Lorenz antropologi.info blog, for long, as been a way for me to feel connected to anthropology developments. Yesterday, while re-reading a recent post about using Comics to present research findings, I've recalled an older post that offered the link to the issues of Opening the source in fieldwork:

"When you do anthropological fieldwork, your main tool is yourself. You participate, you observe and you ask incredible amounts of questions."

I would think this would apply equally well for everyone conducting social science research, either for qualitative or quantitative studies. If for the qualitative paradigm one might not find hard to extend the above citation, it might not be so straight forward for the quantitative research. But it might become clear if one thinks that in quantitative survey instruments, the questions are framed by the researcher, hence the researcher becomes part of the design tool.

Come to think in this terms, all of science is done this way. One of the big differences might be that in anthropological fieldwork the researcher explicitly exposes the self as part of the study (reflexivity) and in other paradigms the researcher is concealed from the reports/narratives of the research, but nevertheless, they are embedded in the research work... and I recall the work of Latour and Wolgar on Laboratory Life: the construction of scientific facts:

"The construction of scientific facts, in particular, is a process of generating texts whose fate (status, value, utility, facticity) depends on their subsequent interpretation."

Communication history in stamps

2011-02-16T16:59:00.002Z

Image from Kees Graaff post

Historical narratives of information artefacts, in a collection curated by Kees de Graaff, Communication: a history in stamps.

Information as thing

2011-02-14T17:11:00.000Z

In accordance with the view of information as thing by Buckland (1999), the article by Jones, W. (2010, No knowledge but through information, First Monday, vol. 15 (9-6), September) brings back the arguments of the need to operate/manage information items and not knowledge: "Knowledge is not a thing to be managed directly. Knowledge is managed only indirectly through information". His view is directed to show that Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) should be viewed as a subset o Personal Information Management (PIM) and not as a higher level approach.

"The ways in which an item is manipulated will vary depending upon its form and the tools available for this form. The tools used for interaction with paper–based information items include, for example, paper clips, staplers, filing cabinets and the flat surfaces of a desktop. In interactions with digital information items, we depend upon the support of various computer–based tools and applications such as e–mail applications, file managers, Web browsers, and so on. (...) Knowledge as ‘no thing’ cannot be managed directly. If we think we have knowledge ‘at our fingertips’ we are most likely touching information in some form instead. This is not to say that knowledge management is not possible. But we do so through its expression in information. There is no management of knowledge except through the management of information."

In his paper he also evokes a pictorial representation of "[i]nformation management activities viewed as an effort to establish, use and maintain a mapping between needs and information. ["illustration was done by Elizabeth Boling and is a variation of a figure that first appeared in Jones (2008)."]

Could not help myself recalling the nonsense of 'knowledge management' by Tom Wilson (2002), which as always provoked great discussions and food for thought in my journey.

Common charger

2011-02-08T19:32:00.001Z

A Common charger for mobile phones in Europe:

"Europe's major mobile phone manufacturers have now agreed to adopt a universal charger for data-enabled mobile phones sold in the EU and as of 2011 you will only need one charger for all."

Now just imagine the even bigger relief (individuals, environment, and industry), if for all the technological artefacts that we have (and carry) there was an Universal Common Charger and what it would mean for personal information management (PIM)!

[Note to self: connect to cases accounts of recharging and electric power needs]

Technology interference in data collection, transcription and analysis

2011-02-01T17:32:00.002Z

Another number of the Forum Qualitative Social Research is out, and although just gave a superficial reading to the table of contents and one of the contributions, the article by Jeanine Evers seem to answer some of my questions and issues when dealing with the huge amount of visual data (mainly photos) that I've collected for my research:

Evers, Jeanine C. (2011). From the Past into the Future. How Technological Developments Change Our Ways of Data Collection, Transcription and Analysis [94 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12(1), Art. 38.

The whole issue is dedicated to «Discussions on Qualitative Data Analysis Software by Developers and Users», which should be of interest for many people doing qualitative research and/or developing technological tools for qualitative analysis, reporting «The KWALON Experiment»:

"The KWALON Experiment consisted of five developers of Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) software analysing a dataset regarding the financial crisis in the time period 2008-2009, provided by the conference organisers. Besides this experiment, researchers were invited to present their reflective papers on the use of QDA software. This introduction gives a description of the experiment, the "rules", research questions and reflective points, as well as a full description of the dataset and search rules used, and our reflection on the lessons learned."

Europe Digital Agenda - The New Renaissance

2011-01-11T11:41:00.001Z

"Comité des Sages" calls for a "New Renaissance" by bringing Europe's cultural heritage online:

"The report urges EU Member States to step up their efforts to put online the collections held in all their libraries, archives and museums. It stresses the benefits of making Europe's culture and knowledge more easily accessible. It also points to the potential economic benefits of digitisation (...) The report's recommendations will feed into the Commission's broader strategy, under the Digital Agenda for Europe, to help cultural institutions make the transition towards the digital age."

"Today europeana.eu already offers access to more than 15 million digitised books, maps, photographs, film clips, paintings and musical extracts, but this is only a fraction of works held by Europe's cultural institutions (see IP/10/1524). Most digitised materials are older works in the public domain, to avoid potential litigation for works covered by copyright."

Elisabeth Niggemann, Jacques De Decker & Maurice Lévy (2011). The New Renaissance. Brussels: Report of the 'Comité des Sages’, Europe.[PDF]

Access hindrances

2011-01-10T10:05:00.001Z

In Right to Research Coalition entry (Access Around the World: Portugal) comes a piece of an interview made to a medical student, that elicits difficulties of access to scientific publications:

"While my colleagues and I face a variety of challenges in conducting research, the one I hear complaints about most often is lack of access to the scientific articles we need for our work. Indeed, our institutions have paid for access to the majority of the “relevant” publications, but that gives rise to questions such as, what if I need to work from home where I don’t have access? Or what if other colleagues are using the several school computers, which often happens? Or what if I need to use an article published by a “not so relevant” journal (according to the university), which the school doesn’t pay for? We face these problems and many others when trying to access research."

In the above account of a medical research student, and contrary to common beliefs about b-on, different places allow for different access to scientific papers. The papers that allow us to build on the shoulders of giants (OTSOG). If you are in a University campus like ISCTE, or in a State Laboratory like LNEG or in University of Minho campus, the access you have to full papers differs (paid subscriptions by each institution are not the same, hence the differences in what one has access). And, if you work on the move (while commuting, travelling, etc.) or outside the campus (home, friends house, public internet spot, etc.) you wont be able to access the full papers, unless you find strategies to «go around» this hindrances. This strategies can be quiet simple or more complex: asking someone on the campus to retrieve the papers for you, search in advance and save/print/email, install a VPN (of course you will need more access passwords, local software installed in your computer/mobile/etc, and even security certificates)... or hack the system, are some of this strategies. All of this consumes (a lot of) time and affects personal information management and related tasks.

This entry was motivated by a Google Alert that I just received about open archives that was linked to the above entry. This in turn stimulated me to write about one of the many invisibilities that I've been researching in the past 4 years, and that are still to see the light of day.

simple recipe for a Merry Christmas

2010-12-17T12:41:00.000Z

Christmas is not about decorations, nor about status, money, cars, pearls, technologies or the latest fashion like they try to tell you over and over again in radio, TV or Web advertisements... neither stress (a lot of it consumerism related!).

Independently from religious views, Christmas is all about reunions, gatherings. It's a psychological time that allows us meeting together with family and friends. It's about sharing time together. The light motive can be a meal, a late supper (consoada), a xmas lunch, tea or dinner. But it does not matter what you do-not-have. It's all about what you-have, and what you have is what it matters! Use your heart, your availability and your creativity to be together with family and friends. The rest? The rest are inventions of organizations that get rich by exploring your feelings through fabricated ideals of happiness and success. You are smarter than them. Feelings come from the inside. They can not be bought. And you know that.

So keep your heart together and let aside the trivial. If you want decorations, bring out those memory objects that have made up who you are, add your own personal touch with recycled things, invite someone to your house or go to someone else's house. Don't wait to be invited if you think you are alone. Make your own cookies, jam, a bread loaf or your special sauce, and go knock on a neighbor's house, a long time friend, a family member you do not visit for a while, a group of relief workers. Give the gift of time with your heart right open, and have a merry Christmas!

EIF for EU

2010-12-16T18:52:00.003Z

European Interoperability Framework for European Public Services (2010). In the annex of the report, they define interoperability as "(...) the ability of disparate and diverse organisations to interact towards mutually beneficial and agreed common goals, involving the sharing of information and knowledge between the organisations, through the business processes they support, by means of the exchange of data between their respective ICT systems."

Further ahead in the report, a reference to paper and face-to-face in the multichannel mix, caught my attention: "Inclusion and accessibility usually involve multichannel delivery. Traditional paper-based or face-to-face service delivery may need to co-exist with electronic delivery, giving citizens a choice of access."

Resoluções que extinguem

2010-09-28T13:04:00.001+01:00

Vai fazer 4 anos que por Resolução do Conselho de Ministros n.º 124/2006 [Diário da República, Série I, de 2006-10-03] se anunciava a reviravolta do sistema dos laboratórios do Estado. Entre muitos outras, lia-se no ponto 5, do anexo:

"É extinto o Instituto Nacional de Engenharia, Tecnologia e Inovação (INETI), sendo os seus recursos científicos e tecnológicos, humanos e materiais reorganizados e integrados noutros laboratórios, centros tecnológicos, instituições de ensino superior e consórcios a criar. Em particular, as infra-estruturas do INETI transformam-se em parque de ciência e tecnologia com a participação e gestão de universidades, laboratórios associados e laboratórios do Estado e alargam-se a parcerias com empresas, no quadro de projectos definidos, organizando-se ainda como espaço de acolhimento de programas europeus de I&D."

Para onde foram os «seus recursos científicos»?
E os «recursos tecnológicos»?
E os «recursos humanos»?
Onde está o «parque de ciência e tecnologia com a participação e gestão de universidades, laboratórios associados e laboratórios do Estado»?

Claro está que estas questões não interessam a ninguém. O que interessa não é cuidar das infra-estruturas e da estabilidade necessárias para que se faça ciência, mas sim ficar bem na fotografia e inscrever nas palavras as intenções de actos que nunca irão ver a luz do dia, tornando irreversíveis os danos causados.

Pelo meio, no decurso de 4 longos anos, foram-se perdendo unidades, recursos científicos e tecnológicos. As cerca de 1000 pessoas na altura? Umas foram resistindo, outras cedendo, depois sucumbindo, caindo ou tombando... reconvertendo horizontes científicos em reformas antecipadas, em trabalho administrativo, em fragmentos profissionais, em alternativas à ciência. Foram-se esvaziando as competências, as capacidades e as equipas que outrora alimentavam e captavam recursos. Os que resistem são menos de 500. Sem novas admissões ou valorização dos que ficam.

O que se ganhou com estas perdas para se sentir que valeu (vale?) a pena: para o país, para a IeD, para o Laboratório, para as unidades, para as equipas e para os reflexos que se fizeram (fazem) sentir na vida de tantos colegas? Quatro anos de transição e a tal «reorganização» ainda por acabar...

[link para o post de 3 de Outubro de 2006, no B2OB: Não basta estar extinto!]

PS [2010, 11 de Outubro]: Recebi (através de um amigo atento) a indicação da publicação em Diário da República da "Lista de Reafectação do Pessoal do INETI ao LNEG". Afinal passámos de cerca de 1000 para 404 efectivos. Ou seja, em 3 anos uma redução de 60% no quadro de pessoal!

Distance (still) matters!

2010-09-10T13:09:00.000+01:00

Olson, Gary M. and Olson, Judith S.(2000). Distance Matters. Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 15(2), pp.139-178.

Contradicting the idea that «Distance is Dead», and supporting with substantive theory in their study, Olson and Olson (2000) clearly show that technological mediated interactions will not completely substitute presence and co-located interactions, even with sophisticated technological use for work: "Distance is not only alive and well, it is in several essential respect immortal" ["(...) synthesized into four key concepts: common ground, coupling of work, collaboration readiness, and collaboration technology readiness"]

Generability in positivism and interpretivism

2010-09-02T14:24:00.001+01:00

Como as questões da generalização continuam na ordem do dia (à mais de 100 anos!), esta entrada pode ser útil para mais pessoas dos sistemas de informação (SI), ou não ;)

Lee, A. S. and Baskerville, R. L. (2003). Generalizing generalizability in information systems research. Information Systems Research, 14(3), pp. 221-243:

"Although Yin’s case research method is considered to be positivist, his concept of analytical generalization has received attention and approval from a prominent interpretive IS researcher,Walsham (1995b). Walsham accepts Yin’s notion of generalizing to theory and extends it to four types of generalization. Walsham explains (pp. 70–80) that, beginning with the facts or the rich description of a case, the researcher can generalize to concepts, to a theory, to specific implications, or to rich insight. All four of Walsham’s examples involve generalizing from empirical statements (reflecting the observations made in a case study) to theoretical statements (concepts, theory ,specific implications,and rich insight).

Klein and Myers (1999) also recognize the process of generalizing from empirical statements to theoretical statements. Whereas they acknowledge that “interpretive research values the documentation of unique circumstances,” they also emphasize, “it is important that theoretical abstractions and generalizations should be carefully related to the case study details as they were experienced and/or collected by the researcher” They add: “The key point here is that theory plays a crucial role in interpretive research,and clearly distinguishes it from just anecdotes” (p. 75). For them,generalizing from idiographic details to theory is so important that they elevate it to one of their seven principles for assessing interpretive field work: The principle of abstraction and generalization." (p. 234)

Yin, R. K. (2009). Case Study Research: Design and Methods (Applied Social Research Methods). Sage Publications, Inc, 4th edition.

Klein, H. K. and Myers, M. D. (1999). A set of principles for conducting and evaluating interpretive field studies in information systems. MIS Quarterly, 23(1), pp.67-93.

Eisenhardt, K. M. (1989). Building theories from case study research. The Academy of Management Review, 14(4), pp.532-550.

Walsham, G. (2006). Doing interpretive research. European Journal of Information Systems, 15(3), pp.320-330. [have no full access to the mentioned paper of Walsham, but this 2006 paper, by the same author, expands on the 1995 paper mentioned above]

semantics to pragmatics

2010-08-16T12:06:00.000+01:00

Olsen et al (1998). Full Text Searching and Information Overload. The International Information & Library Review, vol. 30(2), pp. 105-122:

"While the tools for writing, storing, disseminating and retrieving documents have undergone a revolution in the last few decades, reading is still a very slow process. For practical reasons, we are forced to determine a working set size, i.e., the number of documents that we can handle."

(...)

"By combining metadata and subject terms in a vector-based information space, visualization may give us the opportunity to handle larger document collections and to help the user to find the documents that are most likely to satisfy an information need defined on a pragmatic level."

faraway nearness

2010-08-11T10:01:00.000+01:00

Kenneth J. Gergen (2000). Technology, Self and the Moral Project. in Identity and Social Change, p.146:

"Two virtual places may be "separated" by only a keystroke, but their inhabitants will never meet."

work transitions

2010-08-06T13:40:00.002+01:00

"One of the barriers to making sense of current ~~workplace~~* trends is simply coming to terms with the terminology." (WORKS site, 2008)

The transformation of work in a global knowledge economy: towards a conceptual framework is the .pdf edited version of the need for "a glossary of key terms and concepts", made collaboratively in an European project, WORKS - Changes in Work.

"In the transitional labour market perspective, it is argued that there is a new labour market in which, ‘individuals are more and more confronted with so-called transitions-shifts from work to care, to other work, to education, that might occur sequentially, but also simultaneously’ (Schmid, 2000; see also Bannick, Trommel & Hoogenboom, 2005)." (p.34)

[Note to self]: see Gunther Schmid (2005), Transitional labour markets: a new European employment strategy, pointing out the "four main pathways between standard employment and other statuses. These are: the education-to-work transition; the transition between unemployment and work; the transition between unpaid work and paid work; and the transition to retirement." that are explained in another background paper by Ziguras, Stephen; Considine, Mark; Hancock, Linda; Howe, Brian (2004), From risk to opportunity: labour markets in transition: background paper.

* My stroke in the original word workplace to stress that this problem concerns many other trends.

mobilities open data collection

2010-07-07T22:19:00.003+01:00

Reading Timothy Cresswell (2006), On the Move, and continuing with visual data collection of information artefacts that people carry (including mine) over time.

Not all data collected for my study is open (following participants will) but the ones that are open keep me wondering why they attract so many visitors. Always thought that only me and the people that are participating in the study would have any interest in the photos. Curiosity? An opportunity to look inside private places?

Implications for the study still need to be fully understood, namely the ones that deal with the agents awareness of wider visibility and interest in the photos, beyond research purposes.

will you?

2010-06-23T20:47:00.001+01:00

Metcalfe, Mike (2003). Author(ity): The Literature Review as Expert Witnesses [45 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 4(1), Art. 18, [40 paragraph]:

"My excuse for not presenting any authors' credentials is that I am not saying, "X is true because Smith said so." I hoped I was merely letting the reader know where I sourced an interesting idea and implicitly where they might look if they want to read more on the topic. LATOUR (1987) suspects that most of you will not."

we all need to write our stories

2010-05-30T13:28:00.000+01:00

Choosing the pieces we have designed, collected, created, lived, experienced, exchanged... felt! It's as much an act of making sense as it is of obliteration for everything that could or should be there but will not be found on the text... in a never ending exercise, each time we need to write it down for us, for someone else or for others.

Today tertúlia...

2010-05-17T17:33:00.000+01:00

... Armazém F, with António Câmara. I'll be there because of sixth sense, because of Ydreams, because it's organized by APDSI, and because it's food for though ;)

transdisciplinarity is about transgressing boundaries

2010-03-05T13:44:00.001Z

Helga Nowotny (2009), The Potencial of Transdisciplinarity:

"Here I want to assert that knowledge, as well as expertise, is inherently transgressive. Nobody has anywhere succeeded for very long in containing knowledge. Knowledge seeps through institutions and structures like water through the pores of a membrane. Knowledge seeps in both directions, from science to society as well as from society to science. It seeps through institutions and from academia to and from the outside world. Transdisciplinarity is therefore about transgressing boundaries. Institutions still exist and have a function. Disciplines still exist and new ones arise continuously from interdisciplinary work."

Visual Research Conference

2010-02-16T13:05:00.004Z

For some time now that i feel that i need to know more about the use of visuals for research. Lack of «local» peers to talk about the use visuals in research and the implications of those for the research design, have made me go back to readings... but never really able to discuss what I read.

Just now, a friend of mine, also doing her research, sent me a link to Visual Sociology. They have an open call (till March 30) for an event that will take place in Bologna, July 20-22, this year.

Apart from not knowing how can I afford going in there, the main issue is getting to prepare my contribution and facing that this would be a great opportunity to learn with other people using visuals for research... and a great opportunity to change my long time fears of talking about my work that turn into procrastination.

Thinking, Doing and Publishing Visual Research: the state of the field? Bologna, Italy, July 20-22, 2010.

Although all sessions are interesting, the ones that address more questions I've been doing to myself are:

«Theory of the image»:

- Panel 1, Visual Mobile Landscapes, because it addresses the issues concerning how mobility is perceived (or mobilities like explained in Urry). I'm not only dealing with artefacts (mobile phones being one of them) but I'm also trying to «capture» what kind of mobilities do workers face for getting work done and how do they perceive it. Historical context is also of important and it is addressed.

- Panel 2, Sociology of the Visual, would be great when I can present the results of my research. But I would like to be expose to research done using visuals in order to have a feel of the problems, solutions and options that people using it as a method face.

«Methodology»

- Panel 7, Integrating fieldwork methodologies using Net and its Tools, cause I feel that I don't need to be re-inventing the wheel when finding/learning how to use existing tools and adapting them to my ongoing needs (although it is one of the things that I like most and that also contributes for what others perceive as procrastination)

- Panel 10, Methodological issues of Visual Data Collection, Production and Presentation, cause I have accumulated so many questions during visual data collection and accompanying readings that I feel like jelly when it turns out to justify the need of visuals as an integral part of the basis of my research set in Information Systems.

«Fieldwork»

- Panel 22, Doing Work, a lot of issues in here, but one of the main connections is about «visible» and «(un)visible» work. When we use visuals we bring the «unvisible» visible by way of image... I'm also dealing with use of information artefacts in «private spaces» that by way of documenting visuals become not-private anymore. «Doing work» anywhere is also an issue for conducting fieldwork and, more often then not, I keep asking myself how to have a more robust work?...

And also the panel 27, that deals with representations in visual research and the need for reflexivity. Trying to address this on my research by expliciting my practices, making visuals of my own artefacts in work context but still, not knowing how to integrate that as part of one of the research layers.

continuous present

2010-01-29T08:13:00.000Z

Sarah Pink (2009). Doing Visual Ethnography. Sage, p.150:

"When a photograph is situated in the present tense and is treated as a realist representation, a particular relationship between the text, the image and the ethnographic context is constructed. The specificity of the photographic moment, set in the past, is lost and instead the photograph is situated in a continuous present."

«I draw to better understand things»

2010-01-26T07:57:00.002Z

David Macaulay, TED Talks.

social artefacts

2009-11-20T20:52:00.002Z

From ongoing research project Networks and Mobility in Everyday life: Gustavo Cardoso, Maria do Carmo Gomes, Rita Espanha and Vera Araújo (200?), Mobile Society: mobile phones and social change 2006-2008

"Although cell phones are usually considered mere instruments at their owners’ service, they are also social artifacts. As a communication channel, they support the relationship with others. But, more than this, cell phones communication patterns is influenced by the social context in which it is used, and, as it can be activated from anywhere, at any time, cell phones took up also an active social role. But who communicates with whom? What is the structure of social networks created by communication through cell phones? Is cell phones use connected to a borderline blur between social contexts and individual practices, as our daily roles intertwine?"

(...)

"The present study allowed evaluating the level of Portugal involvement in the Mobile Communication Society, highlighting the main differences between socio demographic groups within the area of several use contexts. On the other hand, it contributed to identify user profiles, enabling to foresee the development path on this sector, where everyday new possibilities emerge. Its major contribution will be perhaps the opening of a discussion about the need to analyze mobility role in general, and cell phones in particular, in today’s society."

in LINI - Lisbon Internet and Networks Institute

"Does this sound familiar?"

2009-11-19T10:08:00.002Z

A piece by Nick Wingfield, on the Wall Street Journal (found via Lilia in my Friendfeed :):

"At the office, you've got a sluggish computer running aging software, and the email system routinely badgers you to delete messages after you blow through the storage limits set by your IT department. Searching your company's internal Web site feels like being teleported back to the pre-Google era of irrelevant search results. At home, though, you zip into the 21st century." [added the bold]

It's also an evidence based on the data I'm collecting. But not in the Information Systems literature, where the research work «assumes» that workers use (only) the organizational systems to get work done. «Assumes» in here refers to the fact that personal artefacts are not part of the conceptual models of Information Systems (IS) nor are the other spaces that workers use to get work done. Maybe this can be seen as deliberate absence of something (John Law, 2004).

Inforgs for The Edge Informavore

2009-11-16T08:46:00.002Z

Food for though: discussions on The Edge have the transcript of a talk with Frank Schirrmacher, The Age of the Informavore ["The term informavore characterizes an organism that consumes information. It is meant to be a description of human behavior in modern information society, in comparison to omnivore, as a description of humans consuming food."], and short note to bring Luciano Floridi Inforgs to The Edge discussion.

Luciano Floridi (2009). The Philosophy of Information, its Nature and Future Developments. Special issue of The Information Society, dedicated to "The Philosophy of Information, its Nature and Future Developments", vol. 25(3):

"We become mass-produced, anonymous entities among other anonymous entities, exposed to billions of other similar inforgs online. So we self-brand and re-appropriate ourselves in cyberspace by blogs and facebook entries, homepages, youtube videos, and flickr albums. We use and expose information about ourselves to become less informationally indiscernible."

Inforg, connected informational organisms. Detailed explanation in Floridi, L. (2007), "A Look into the Future Impact of Ict on Our Lives", The Information Society, vol. 23(1), pp. 59-64.

"The most obvious way in which the new ICTs are re-ontologizing the infosphere concerns (a) the transition from analogue to digital data and then (b) the ever-increasing growth of our digital space."

"(...) a quieter, less sensational and yet crucial and profound change in our conception of what it means to be an agent. We are all becoming connected informational organisms (inforgs). This is happening not through some fanciful transformation in our body, but, more seriously and realistically, through the re-ontologization of our environment and of ourselves."

---------------------

Would like very much to connect to Leonor's thoughts about PI and listen to her reflections about it. Are you there?...

Why Personal Information Management (PIM) matters?

2009-11-05T08:03:00.000Z

“Learning to be intelligent starts by learning to manage information.” Choo, 2003

open data [collection]

2009-11-03T13:38:00.004Z

In my social network, Ton as been the person that as thought me a great deal about the usefulness of Open Data (OD), although he might not be aware of that [conversations with Lilia :)]. First thoughts I had about open data concerned my research activity and what it meant in terms of ethical issues namely, protection of human subjects, if I was to share the collected data and not because I have any personal problem in sharing.

I believe in sharing but I also believe that we should talk more about open data in research, in social sciences and ethical issues in particular. Apart from changing research behaviours, we are still collecting data from real people and we need to know more about it so we can still protect human subjects, while conducting our research. But then, if we treat them as participants and not as subjects, does it change our obligations to protect them? As researchers, we are responsible to conceal information that our participants have given us, and that we think in our judgement it might be harmful for them, are we not? [side question: if/when methods are given by a science researcher, will the teacher warn students about human research ethics?]

While studying organizations, in order to increase access to study people in organization(s), the researcher or team can decide, à priori, to grant anonymity and restrictions on the data set. This situation can even mean that the leading researcher will sign a declaration guarantying that the data collected in the study will only be used for that specific study. Following this guidelines, is expected to increase the organization trust on the researcher(s). On the other hand, if we are receiving public or European funding, it makes sense that deliverables, papers and data are given back to the society, hence open source, open access, open data and in general, the open movement shift that we have been witnessing from some time.

In order to use open data in social studies, one must incorporate this view while thinking about the research design to define what's going to be part of the open data set. We know that our choices, always determine what we will get and how we can get it. We have also to think about when to give access to the data collected. The social side of research means that releasing the data during the study can influence the behaviour of the people we are studying and hence affect the study results. Besides data, there are so many of us using social tools in the research processes (flickr for easy of coding photos, citeUlike for papers collection, blogs for work in progress, slideshare for...) maybe we just have to make it part of the study...

Funny, when I though of this post I just wanted to do a quick note about the Open Data Kit (*) as useful tools for collecting data during fieldwork... and ended up making my 15 minutes exercise in a public post ;)

_______________________________________

(*) So, the tools currently available on the Open Data Kit (ODK), according to the information in the project page:

ODK Collect - phone based replacement for paper forms, built on the Android platform. It can collect a variety of form data types, like text, location, photos, video, audio, and barcodes. This functionality could be very useful for fieldwork data collection in social science studies.
ODK Aggregate - although not officially launched, it "provides a ready to deploy online repository to store, view and export collected data (...) and enables free hosting of data on Google", if one can does not have the required housing infrastructure.
ODK Manage - for managing the transfer of forms, data and applications between the mobile phone devices, using SMS.
ODK Validate - serves to validate and ensure the forms work well with all the ODK tools.
ODK Voice - also not officially launched, it facilitates "(...) mapping XForms to sound snippets that can be played over a "robo" call to any phone. Responses are collected using the phone's keypad (DTMF) and are automatically aggregated."

life

2009-10-21T10:59:00.001+01:00

"Queria convencer-me que tudo dura para sempre, mas tudo tem um fim. Na verdade, nada dura mais do que um instante a não ser aquilo que guardamos na nossa memória (...)" Sam Savage (2009), Firmin

ICT have changed how we keep our memories. How do those external memories change our life?

idiosyncrasies and information behaviour in teams

2009-08-31T09:31:00.004+01:00

Hyldegård, J. (2009). "Personality traits and group-based information behaviour: an exploratory study" Information Research, 14(2) paper 402:

"(...) Many studies exist on information behaviour in groups or teams (e.g., Case 2007), and a number of influencing variables have been identified, such as role, complexity of work task and social cost. Building upon this previous research it is hypothesised that the mere group setting in focus here will influence as well as mediate between individuals’ personality traits and their information behaviour."

when silence can mean a million things...

2009-08-25T11:36:00.007+01:00

... and «talking» mean an empty life

I've been trying to learn how interactions between two people work in an era of perpetual contact (Katz & Aakhus, 2002) and I'm puzzled by the meanings of silence and how people seem to manage it in such elaborate ways. This seems to add new layers to the old communication paradigms, that were, mostly, based on face to face (f2f) interactions. It does not stop amazing me that, with all the communication channels available, it gets harder for people to get (and stay) together. And I keep thinking of a million things, but writing only a few that keep coming to my mind:

The elaboration of the mediated self, seems to be consuming all the time people have and detracting them for experiencing the, what might seem, the limitation of the physical world
Fears of failing in a world where people can bump into one another without being able to hold to a more controlled information space where they decide and control what is said and to whom, in their own grounds... and if they don't know something, they can always google it for staying better in the picture
The accelerated perception that people seem to feel that they have seen it all, that they can classify everything and that they can know everything, just because they can read it in words, in images or sound somewhere on the web
Hindering their capacity to marvel in face of serendipitous otherness discovery from casual encounters, just by feeling good by enjoying all the senses around «just a cup a coffee»
A need to accelerate the sense of «knowing someone» without the time required to «get to know someone» in different life stages, besides the digital ensemble ones
The perceive need to «say and show everything», taking away the magic of the exercise needed to play out with clues and trying to figure out what might the other be
The excessive ritualization where people really have to construct elaborate scripts to have «casualty encounters»
A sense of competitive «market for friends» in which if one does not became «friend» there will be millions of others in line that will
Growing difficulty to spot the genuine

I long for other rhythms. The kind that makes one feel happier for not needing to use technology for mediation of loneliness and emptyness.

taking time off

2009-08-02T18:00:00.003+01:00

By Jorge Cham (2009/07/31), "Vacation Justification"

technologies as cultural artefacts

2009-07-30T19:53:00.005+01:00

Cornford, Tony (2003) Information systems and new technologies: Taking shape in use. In: Avgerou, Chrisanthi and La Rovere, Renata Lèbre, (eds.) Information systems and the economics of innovation, pp. 162-177.

Woolgar, Steve (1996). Technologies as Cultural Artefacts. In Dutton, William and Peltu, H. Malcolm, (eds.) Information and communication technologies, pp. 87-102.

a litle bit later...

2009-07-28T15:03:00.004+01:00

... a friend came by. We stayed in the winter garden. We talked less than we usually do when we are together. Coffee in the table. Talking about research work. Talking about life. Back to working again. Each one, facing it's own computer.

Inside I'm thinking about the meaning of live. A much to big question. Start to think that is easier if I just think about the meaning of live for me. Guess I'm starting to understand that the meaning of life is loving passionately. When we love someone or something, we can build dreams. Inside us grows a force that tells us that we can make anything. Everything. Must be the reason why people in love feel younger, rejuvenated, energized.

We talk again. The sound of typing in each computer and the clicks on her mouse, must be a sign that we are both working. I light another cigarette... Way to many in this last days! I go on thinking about love and the meaning of life, and how we need to love and feel loved. This must be a to often talked about topic. But my mind wants me to go on. My fingers are doing the typing. And that makes me feel like working. I'm not. Sometimes, we just have to keep on. Typing, you know. Even if nothing comes out, they say we have to keep typing. I wonder. I keep typing, nevertheless.

Back to thinking about what's the meaning of life. No. Back to thinking about what's the meaning of my existence. Thoughts like these should have ended long ago in my teenage years. It seems not. Forty one years, and now I don't have an answer. Funny to think that in the meantime, along the way, I thought I had the answers. The effort we put on reconstructing, all the way, the meaning of our lives in such a delicate balance. Sometimes, without anticipation, they simply disappear. Collapse. Maybe we can't just remember. Maybe it's just a system malfunction. Maybe some events trigger these kind of thoughts. Mid life crises. If only I could be just a label, life would carry on. Normal. Usual.

Back from thinking, still in the winter garden. Just some sounds. We're both still working. Well, at least we are both still looking into our computers and typing. The sound of the mouse is louder. So is the sound of typing. We must be both working hard... because that's the only sound in here. Now we don't talk. I go make us more coffee. Maybe it will keep us typing longer. And we talk about the coffee and then get back to working (or should I say, back to typing). So many things that need not to be said when we are with a long time friend. Life, sometimes, does not look easy. We keep on. We must all keep on. We clinch to dreams. Dreaming is good. I need those to keep running. But I'm tired...

Had I been dreaming all along? How can a dream, so delightful, so long awaited for, can be taken back? My mind tries to recreate past events. Memorable. Are they real? They must have been. They are so vivid in my mind that they seem real. Once upon a time, there was a women who worked in a Government Research Lab. An ordinary women, working in an extraordinary place. There was not a single day that matched the previous one(s). Everyday had something special. Something unique, that needed to be learnt and shared... [...].

No. It was a dream, I'm sure. There's no trace of that place. Went looking for the office that faced the private garden, with the books on the shelves, the green plants, the mind map pieces glued on the door, the traces of past, present and future projects, the energetic team, all the partners involved in the projects, the working, the challenges.... nothing. None of those things exist. But if those 5 years, were but a dream, what was I doing during that time? Why do I keep pretending that they are still there? Why does my mind keeps convincing me that they existed?... I must be tired.

Have to think about getting back to life (whatever that is)! In the mean time, maybe I get to live another dream and my mind can fly away from all the reality that is sucking me.

case(s) sampling

2009-06-26T22:41:00.004+01:00

This topic as been (too often) present in our discussions and deserves an entry on it's own. If you want, you can add your own views, and/or other citations, and/or contrary views ;-)

Kathleen M Eisenhardt & Melissa E Graebner (2007). Theory building from cases: opportunities and challenges. Academy of Management Journal, vol. 50(1), pp. 25-32:

"(...) frequent challenge to theory building from cases concerns case selection. Some readers make the faulty assumption that the cases should be representative of some population, as are data in large-scale hypothesis testing research. In other words, they ask, How can the theory generalize if the cases aren’t representative?

(...) clarify that the purpose of the research is to develop theory, not to test it, and so theoretical (not random or stratified) sampling is appropriate. Theoretical sampling simply means that cases are selected because they are particularly suitable for illuminating and extending relationships and logic among constructs. (...) cases sampled for theoretical reasons, such as revelation of an unusual phenomenon, replication of findings from other cases, contrary replication, elimination of alternative explanations, and elaboration of the emergent theory."

connecting «distractions» with literature

2009-06-26T09:31:00.002+01:00

Just a quick note to add resources made available by 2 research groups on information overload and interruptions, following the entry about Distraction(s)...

weblog as PIM tool

2009-06-11T13:10:00.005+01:00

Efimova, L. (2009). Weblog as a personal thinking space. Forthcoming in: HT’09: Proceedings of the twentieth ACM conference on hypertext and hypermedia, June 2009. New York: ACM:

"Using weblogs as a knowledge base, and then as an instrument to support PhD work, creates synergies, as the effort that goes into creating and organising entries [posts] later pays off by providing more ways for retrieval, and a better quality of the material to be reused. In turn, the experience of reuse or unexpected discoveries that older posts bring stimulates putting more effort in creating new entries." (p. 8)

Resulting from her own practice to a finished dissertation, using an autoethnography approach, Lilia presents a detailed account of that process, summarized in a table, showing "how different stages of idea development [during the PhD process] are supported by the activities around the weblog content."

Another strong point is made concerning the role of paper in knowledge work, and although I only saw the paper today, was glad to see that it reasons with the preliminary findings of the data I've been collecting and the entry that I've made previously, that it reasons with my own use of blogs for supporting research, and also for advocating the use of blogs instead of pages for eliciting the on going process of doctoral research work. Doing it requires "requires the filtering [of] large amounts of information, making sense of it, and connecting the different bits and pieces to come up with new ideas. In this process, physical and digital artefacts play an important role" (Efimova, 2009, p. 2).

The blog allows also for the integration of permanent captures of temporary information in that sense the blog works like a canvas that can display scrapnotes in other contexts extending their use for the weaving of new knowledge. But like she says in the paper,

"The connection between the functionalities of weblog technologies and their uses for personal information management needs further examination. The similarity between the roles my weblog plays in supporting my work and those of paper collections in other studies indicate a need to explore the affordances of weblog technologies from PIM perspective and possibilities of learning from blogging when designing other tools, in particularly those that support managing information scraps that do not fit current tools" (p. 9)

different perceptions of academic spaces

2009-06-08T10:06:00.012+01:00

As a student, I don't review myself in the words of Tapscott. Maybe in most of my higher education I was very, very lucky. I did my bachelor in Macau (South of China), back in 1995-1998 and the majority of my teachers engaged with students in deep discussions and debates. Many times, the discussions continue outside the class room. Maybe because class-size (turmas) where around 30 people and not hundreds. But this should be viewed as anedotical evidence, since it is my own perception not based in any research, unlike the research based on the evidences collected by Tapscott in the US.

In my own life as student in the academic context, the questioning of our assumptions was the stage for our discoveries. Our teachers have done so in such a way, that we still maintain conversations today with some of them. The thousands of miles that separate us made the conversation fade, even though we could all communicate via CMC, makes me thing how important it is the social practice of face to face mentoring, so characteristic of academic spaces.

Later on, back to Portugal, following my 'licenciatura' (1999-2001), I moved to a pos-graduation (2001-2002), then a master (2002-2004) and now I'm on a PhD program (2006-2010) all in Portugal. I find the same engaging, the same will and open minds from the tutors and mentors with whom I cross. Some of the bonds that started in higher education later became business and work opportunities outside the educational system.

I agree that some things need to be changed, that the model needs perfecting, but I fail to see the end of Universities mainly because they are a gathering place where conversations can flow without restrictions, without our bias (seeing only what we want to see, is typical when each one of us is looking for information the web) and serendipity of finding what we did not know it existed happens through mentoring and exposition to contradicting views, of colleagues making questions that we did not knew how to ask, that otherwise would 'simple' be there 'invisible'.

Having access to all the courses information available, is not enough for all of us to become knowledgeable on those subjects. Like it's not enough to be able to access all the scientific databases to make a PhD. Even if we are independent learners (I wonder if we ever are!) we need to experience it, to articulate it, to try it out, to share it with others. Blogs, wikis, IM, and all the social tools that we have available, are great, and I've been using them for quite some time, and I'm longing even more for those moments where we can sit together, face to face, and articulate in a more encompassing language (where the non-verbal is the greatest part of our communication), where we are all hearing the same things, where we have the opportunity to read the silences, to articulate our discoveries, to let the unexpected and unlooked for emerge in the interactions.

The more I use technologies, the more I long for a place of real interaction with less noise and more meaningful interactions. With the people that I've come to know over the years over CMC and the continuing sense of friendship that grown out of it, comes also the frustration and the sorrow of not being able to be there to be part, to share special moments like this. We can flatten the world with ICT but our social relations are not substituted by «platforms». We still need to be able to live our relations with all our senses, not just by creating our digital identities and much less by disembodiment of our knowledge to resume it to bits of scattered information.

No! Information comes with the passion of long weaved and crafted social interactions that makes it much more than just words, images, sounds. Information comes with memories, with all the senses we have used in the distinct, the unique journeys that each one of us makes. Some of them come from having to know things that we wouldn't wont to look for. Even frustration, pain, losses, they are all needed to understand the information that surrounds us. And do not get me wrong. Technology is great. I'm a great enthusiast myself. But I do not think it should ever be used to justify short cuts of motivation and the need to find meaning that is not around the corner, ready to use (or to be bought). We live very assimetrical realities. What for some are fluent tools for others are handicaps, but they both have a very important place, and we should not afford loosing any of them. They are all needed. They are all part of a delicate ecology in our long history of learning.

For sure that the models in use can be perfected, but not the excuse of lack of tools for not making it, since they are at our finger tip disposal and we can (and are) bringing them to the academia (and the organizations and circles we are part of). That's also part of the privilege times we are witnessing. When we can all share tools as needed instead of having them imposed on us. Let us choose according to our needs, sculpting together the spaces of our learning.

-------

Thoughts on reading the provoking piece on the Edge: The Impending Demise of the University By Don Tapscott, that wrote the well known book «Growing up Digital: The rise of the Net Generation».

Just because...

2009-06-05T20:38:00.011+01:00

... it was the most inspiring piece of information I ever received!

desktop research

2009-06-04T09:20:00.003+01:00

From the Integrated Systems team of Microsoft Research, the Research Desktop project: "Research Desktop augments the standard desktop environment (...) [i]t provides support in four key areas: Activities, Tools, Library and Notes." Looking in more detail to the available project overview, some things caught my attention in respect to visual cues:

instead of the «type of file» icons, richer visual aids are given: book covers, actual display of photos, first pages of documents, groups of working information (including the tools that were used to manipulate that information)
the integration of a scrapbook were one can lay out documents and make scrapping like anotations: althought I'm convince that it will not substitute the paper scrappings in support for work, it nevertheless helps visualize work-in-progress needs when messing around with ideas. Remember that scrappings have also a social dimension during meetings: they have an important place during brainstorming, think-out-loud, and collaboration gatherings. Also, one of the places for scrappings is very often walls (either by whiteboards, placards), which can be related to the fact that individuals want to be in permament visual contact with that «work-in-progress». But this is just a feeling that needs to be verified

Some questions that come to my mind, regarding the Research Desktop. Since one of the components of collections, is the previous existence of items (unless it is a new user who has never collected anything previous to start using a new tool!) how will existing information «move» to this interface:

will it be available regradless of OS used?
will it require manual adding?
can the individual use any information format, regardless of previous OS / application / artifact?
since information is social, is it easy to share with team members, post on the web, transfer to other spaces (like printing on a large paper the scapbooking to hang on a wall) sharing with team members that have different OS or browsers?

Note to self: found this project because of the footprints left by someone that made a search for papers of Bergman, that took him to my profile in Academia.edu (that warn me about it), I've followed the link back to a paper of Bergman et al presented in CHI2009 (April), where I found other papers from Microsoft in a PIM session, which I then googled for access of the full paper, and arrived at Microsoft paper archive that was under the project umbrela.

The paper from Bergman et al:
Bergman, O., Tucker, S., Beyth-Marom, R., Cutrell, E., and Whittaker, S. (2009). It's not that important: demoting personal information of low subjective importance using GrayArea. In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 - 09, 2009). CHI '09. ACM, New York, NY, pp. 269-278.

The paper from Oleksik et al:

Oleksik, G., Wilson, M. L., Tashman, C., Mendes Rodrigues, E., Kazai, G., Smyth, G., Milic-Frayling, N., and Jones, R. (2009). Lightweight tagging expands information and activity management practices. In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 - 09, 2009). CHI '09. ACM, New York, NY, pp. 279-288.

storing artefacts

2009-06-03T11:05:00.007+01:00

[Image by Rusty Orr, Egyptian hieroglyphs, a low-density, long-lifetime storage medium, courtesy of the author and Zettl Research Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California at Berkeley.]

Note to self: see rumblings in notebook (June 3rd, 2009) and paper with artefact expected to extend the lifetime and density of bit storage for large archives ("density as high as 1012 bits/in2, and thermodynamic stability in excess of one billion years." p. 1835) and how technological artefacts narrate human mobility, in this case storage artefacts.

Begtrup, G. E., Gannett, W., Yuzvinsky, T. D., Crespi, V. H., and Zettl, A. (2009). Nanoscale reversible mass transport for archival memory. Nano Letters, 9(5):1835-1838.

integrating flows of communication

2009-06-02T17:44:00.004+01:00

Notice how Google Wave focus is not on knowledge management (KM) but on communication and collaboration. More precisely, in integrating flows of communication. And although it will only be release in the end of the year, you can show your interest by submitting your email.

After seeing the video, I can't wait to use it in real life research projects. While the use of web tools was of great value, there where always issues of individual preference for using different tools, and in the end we ended up with more scattered information across different tools. Because most of them where used only if a private space was provided, it added for the difficulty of moving information from one place to the other.

As for the last words in the Google Wave presentation "can't wait to see what you are gone come up with, guys", I'm just waiting for my time to come and play around with it :-)

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Time costs and disconnectedness in PIM systems

2009-05-14T09:55:00.006+01:00

Van Kleek, M. G., Bernstein, M., Panovich, K., Vargas, G. G., Karger, D. R., and Schraefel, M. (2009). Note to self: examining personal information keeping in a lightweight note-taking tool. In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 - 09, 2009). CHI '09. ACM, New York, NY, 1477-1480:

"We also observed that users often do not respect the traditional boundaries of PIM — for example, by mashing contact information into calendar appointments and calling it a to-do. This may be yet another instance of users optimizing for rapid capture: the time cost of interacting with multiple traditional PIM applications is even more substantial than that needed for one. But we believe another issue is in play: that they feel the information is a unit, and do not wish to partition it among multiple disconnected applications, where it will be harder to view and retrieve as a unit. This indicates a significant need for a more flexible data model and user model in PIM systems." (p. 1480)

Another related entry on scrapnotes and «technologizing» everything with links for the Haystack Group and associated projects, like the one referred in the study - List.it.

sixth sense

2009-05-11T19:40:00.005+01:00

Apart from being a mobile solution (instead of the Microsoft Surface that is attached to a table), what I found very interesting in this TED Talk was the fact that this solution accommodates the use of physical paper in our daily lives in very different contexts of daily life and also the border less notion of work and non-work situations in individuals life, thus addressing support for information space transitions.

I'm listing this future technology as something that will change present PIM needs if, like it is said, the costs can be reduced with mass fabrication. Somethings where not said and need to be better understood namely, system requirements that allow the system to recognize so many different actors. I imagine that there is a need for individuals to «feed» some of this information in the background, like the information that allows to «recognize» the actors that we cross with (considering that not all the people we meet are public figures ;)

More details on the Sixth Sense Project in a short paper describing the prototype, Mistry, P., Maes, P., and Chang, L. (2009). WUW - wear Ur world: a wearable gestural interface. In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 - 09, 2009). CHI EA '09. ACM, New York, NY, pp. 4111-4116:

"Information is traditionally confined to paper or digitally to a screen. In this paper, we introduce WUW, a wearable gestural interface, which attempts to bring information out into the tangible world. By using a tiny projector and a camera mounted on a hat or coupled in a pendant like wearable device, WUW sees what the user sees and visually augments surfaces or physical objects the user is interacting with. WUW projects information onto surfaces, walls, and physical objects around us, and lets the user interact with the projected information through natural hand gestures, arm movements or interaction with the object itself."

MIT Media Lab's new Fluid Interfaces Group, Pattie Maes researches the tools we use to work with information and connect with one another. Other projects that caught my attention: Quickies - Intelligent Sticky Notes (related to scrapings use in PIM, and make use of RFID on the back of each post-it)

information distillation

2009-05-07T20:20:00.030+01:00

Inspired by the image provided by SciTopics (above) provided by Scirius, I wonder if the information is distilled by others, won't the individual be distilling a little further by the act of reading with losses in the process? When doing research we have to distill it ourselves to gain the needed knowledge to advance the research. Distilling is part of the process of creating new knowledge. In the picture above (obviously biased by what I've been doing), in the last rectangular that reads «SciTopics» I read «Literature Review» ;-)

PS [Oct 14, 2009] note to self: see Webtrendmap model on «information curators» (via GSiemens Newsletter) and also Mopsos model back in 2004 on blogs (as information elicitation) for CoPs formation (end of post, link to image model).

paper in knowledge work

2009-04-24T10:38:00.006+01:00

In between coding and analysing data collected from different workers, in different settings, I'm reading «The myth of the paperless office», by Sellen & Harper (2003, paperback, following «How much information?» 2000 & 2003). Their first words relate to the information artefacts sorrounding them, being paper the one that populates the most their visible environment:

"As we write this book, we have paper all around us. On the desks are stacks of articles, rough notes, outlines, and printed e-mail message. On the wall are calendars, Post-it notes, and photographs. On the shelves are journals, books, and magazines. The filling cabinets and the wastebasket are also full of paper. Among all this sit our computers, on which the composition takes place."

Considering that the study was conducted until 2001, one could be surprised to find the same results 8 years later (see above illustration with some data that I've been collecting), unless you read the complete study and understand the role of paper in supporting knowledge work.

One of the main differences between the observations made, concern the place of observing. While in the book their main concern was observations in work settings, they nevertheless acknowledge that the role of the paper in the future would be reinforced in supporting knowledge work. One of such increases would be due to growing mobility of workers and working also at home, which is visible in the exploratory data collection above:

"Paper now populates not only the workplace but also the home office and the mobile worker's briefcase."(p. 208)

We can still sense the myth of the paperless office associated with progress. In December 2008, in an event promoted by the National Association for the Promotion and Development of the Information Society (APDSI), they where refering to it as a natural move forward. In the white paper report, in the introduction section (p.7), one can read:

"Os novos trabalhadores do conhecimento deixarão cada vez mais de usar canetas e papel, passando a autenticar trabalhos e decisões através de assinaturas electrónicas e a trabalhar lado a lado com processos decisórios automatizados por regras e algoritmos computacionais. (...) todos reconhecerão as tarefas substantivas e mais ou menos críticas que lhes são cada vez mais solicitadas neste novo ambiente (electrónico) de trabalho." (p.7)

[my rought translation: "The new knowledge workers will increasingly stop using pen and paper, and start authenticating work and decisions through electronic signatures and working side by side with automated decision making processes by rules and automated computer algorithms. (...) all will recognize the substantive and more or less critical tasks that are increasingly required of them in this new (electronic) environment of work. "]

The thing is that knowledge work is not only autenticating. Something needs to exist for authentication ocurrences. We seem to be still farway (althought spam messages say otherwise) from automation in creating new information that helps build knowledge. Someone has to craft it[1]. Could this automation corresponde to a vision of managers, the ones that live life for a lot of decision making? What we still see is that paper continues to have a roll in supporting knowledge work even among technological environments. Maybe it also captures the so much entangled notion of paper not allowing technological progress, the symbolic problem refered in detail by Sellen & Harper (2003).

One might think that better skills in digital literacy would foster less paper use. But not when it comes to knowledge work, at least. At some points, paper artefacts are crucial for finding meaning, making sense, brainstorming and even getting things done. It's been wonderful to observe what Lilia as accomplished. You can see, according to her own criteria[2], what role did paper play on her way to a finished PhD:

PS [June 26, 2009] According to a new page created, there will be an update to «How much information» 2000 and 2003:

"To answer these questions and others, an updated and expanded How Much Information? (HMI) research program is underway. The initial report will be the first in a three-year research program, sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and seven companies, AT&T, Cisco, IBM, Intel, LSI, Oracle, and Seagate."

Also they have already reserved a space for «The History of Information» and they will be populating the timeline with a series of historical references.

__________________________

[1] Can you imagine how glad pleanty of people would be, if they could automate the writing of their dissertations? Of course that would reduce the dissertation value (if any) in the process of learning. Not to talk about books like «How to write a lot: a pratical guide to productive academic writing», by Paul J. Silvia (2008), wouldn't be needed.

[2] One can choose to observe with a set of lenses or (try to) observe with the lenses of the observed. That's the differences of etic (observer lenses) and emic (from the perspective of the observed). In my study, I've choose an emic approach but since I can not put aside my own beliefs and world view, I'm also collecting data about my own behaviour and others in order to explicit it and be more aware of my own bias.

[WC 755]

transições

2009-04-06T13:56:00.005+01:00

Há muito que sentia vontade de recomeçar. Há algum tempo que o B2OB já não seguia a linha editorial que tinha presidido à sua criação. Nem ele, nem eu!

Tanta coisa mudou desde que ele foi criado, que às vezes me dava a sensação que seguiamos vidas paralelas. Ele, tentando ser o que os anos foram moldando. Eu, tentando seguir em frente, com uma nova identidade, com um novo estatuto, numa nova fase de vida.

Pois bem, without suits, just with my daily jeans, working mainly at my home office, blogs continue to be my favourite interface with digital spaces. B2OB was focused on the use of blogs (and other social software) in the organization I used to work. That organization does not exist anymore. «Monica's jeans» editorial is much more loose. So loose as to accommodate my life outside the organizational context, while working for my research. So in case you where looking for «Mónica André» or «B2Ob», it's way back, around the corner 2003 to 2008. If you are looking for «Mónica Mendes Pinheiro», «Monica's jeans» or life beyond the organizational context, well it's starting to take shape here, in this blog.

Nem sequer ainda me decidi pela língua que irei utilizar. Parece-me irrelevante neste momento. Será a que for achando mais apropriada. Monica's jeans, pretende apenas ser o meu interface favorito em ambiente digital. A tal canvas onde posso ir incorporando outras ferramentas. Um local para conversar. Devagar. Sem pressas. Para trás ficaram os «fatos organizacionais» e a minha vida num contexto mais formal, que me auto-regulava o discurso.

Se aqui estás a ler estas linhas, «Olá, conta coisas!» BTW, if you read it till here let me know about you (and all the «information artefacts» you use ;)

Note

2009-04-06T07:20:00.003+01:00

Entries before this date were imported from «information space transitions», a private space for messing around with my thoughts, (like the notebooks that have been accompanying me for the last 22 years) that only a few friends have access and my advisor:

"[T]he starting point of my phd research as it emerged during my master's research work. Like a notebook, [that] space is restricted so I can mess around with my thoughts without the fear of misleading passing by strangers (...)"

Some of posts from «blog da tese» were also imported under the tag «Blog da Tese import». Some of the posts were so «context dependent», that it did not make any sense to bring them to this space. It's a lot like moving from one house to another: you decide what you are going to move with you, and what you are letting go. But unlike moving from one house to another, I can always (not sure how long this «always» will be ;) go there, and look for it.

«information behaviour» vs «information practices»

2009-03-30T18:54:00.001+01:00

In Professor Tom Wilson's Blog (Information Research - ideas and debates), there's a discussion going on about «information behaviour» and «information practices», being the later a more incopassing terminology:

"Information behaviour and information practice are closely related. They incorporate common elements such as "action" but still they are not reducible to each other. Behaviour draws more strongly on the tradition of psychology (or social psychology) while the conceptualizations of practice draw more on sociology (Bourdieu, Giddens) and social philosophy (Schutz, Schatzki, Wittgenstein). From this perspective, information behaviour and information practice complement each other"

The conversation is based on a review by Tom Wilson, on the book of Savolainen, Reijo Everyday information practices: a social phenomenological perspective. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008. Since I do not have access to the book, will keep for now the link to the review in Information Research Journal:

Wilson, T.D. (2008). Review of: Savolainen, Reijo Everyday information practices: a social phenomenological perspective. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008. Information Research, 14(1), review no. R327.

«Infrastructures» definition by EU Commission

2009-03-27T20:38:00.001Z

Research Infrastructures and the Regional Dimension of the ERA, MEMO/09/134, Brussels, 25 March 2009:

Importance of Research Infrastructures for Europe
[definition:] “Research Infrastructure” are facilities, resources and related services that are used by the scientific community to conduct top-level research in their respective fields. This definition covers: major scientific equipment or sets of instruments; knowledge based-resources such as collections, archives or structured scientific information; enabling ICT-based infrastructures such as Grid, computing, software and communications. Such Research Infrastructures may be “single-sited” or “distributed” (a network of resources).
[examples of what constitutes infrastructures:] Examples of Research Infrastructures range from synchrotrons, telescopes, high power lasers, or high performance computers, to research vessels, bio-banks, brain imaging facilities, clean rooms, data archives, etc.
[contributions of infrastructures to EU Research:] High quality, internationally open Research Infrastructures are necessary tools to carry out top quality research. They contribute to extending the frontiers of knowledge, supporting industrial innovation, exchanging and transmitting knowledge, and training the next generation of top researchers. Therefore, Research Infrastructures are at the core of the “knowledge triangle”, combining Research, Education and Innovation.

faster and lighter batteries

2009-03-16T21:09:00.001Z

Research in MIT, Computational and Experimental Design of Emerging materials Research group (CEDER), might solve electric power needs while on mobility: Novel material for rechargable battery (in more or less 3 years).

losses in «information transitions»: time, errors, sync

2009-03-08T11:50:00.001Z

Example of information loss in «information transitions». Actual high mobility of healthcare workers to collect data on tuberculosis patients. IS applied research solution: capturing information (almost) directly to PDA. Still have to be entered by workers, but after collected through the PDA stays in digital form and is apt for transfer to other IS.

"Under the old patient tracking system, a team of four healthcare workers would visit more than 100 health care centers and labs twice a week to record patient test results on paper sheets. A couple of times a week, they returned to their main office to transcribe those results onto two sets of forms per patient -- one for the doctors and one for the health care administrators.

From start to finish, that process took an average of more than three weeks per patient. There was also greater potential for error because information was copied by hand so many times.

With the new system, health care workers enter all of the lab data into their handheld devices, using medical software designed for this purpose. When the workers return to their office, they sync up the PDAs with their computers. " [taken from Harvard-MIT Health Science and Technology News & Events, Researchers use handheld devices to monitor TB patients in Peru]

mobility concept

2009-03-06T11:24:00.001Z

Kakihara, M. and Sørensen, C. (2001). Expanding the 'mobility' concept. SIGGROUP Bull. 22, 3 (Dec. 2001), pp. 33-37:

"The train and airline infrastructures are highly integrated with ICTs such as electronic reservation systems and traffic control systems. It is therefore important to recognize that the fundamental nature of technological revolution in the late twentieth century is the dynamic and complex interplay between old and new technologies and between the reconfiguration of the technological fabric and its domestication (...).This paper concerns the concept of mobility, which manifests such a transformation of our social lives combining new and old technologies. It is now widely argued that our life styles have become increasingly mobile in the sense that the speed of transportation and hence geographical reach within a given time span is dramatically augmented by modern technological developments and sophistication such as train and airplane systems."

Multiple computer devices

2009-03-06T10:33:00.001Z

Dearman, D. and Pierce, J. S. (2008). It's on my other computer!: computing with multiple devices. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 - 10, 2008), pp. 767-776:

"The number of computing devices that people use is growing. To gain a better understanding of why and how people use multiple devices, we interviewed 27 people from academia and industry. From these interviews we distill four primary findings. First, associating a user's activities with a particular device is problematic for multiple device users because many activities span multiple devices. Second, device use varies by user and circumstance; users assign different roles to devices both by choice and by constraint. Third, users in industry want to separate work and personal activities across work and personal devices, but they have difficulty doing so in practice Finally, users employ a variety of techniques for accessing information across devices, but there is room for improvement: participants reported managing information across their devices as the most challenging aspect of using multiple devices. We suggest opportunities to improve the user experience by focusing on the user rather than the applications and devices; making devices aware of their roles; and providing lighter-weight methods for transferring information, including synchronization services that engender more trust from users."

(behind the) information made simple

2009-03-03T10:36:00.001Z

Visual and voice translation of the History of the Internet: complex information made simple. Inspiring.

What we see is a finished product. Much more interesting was to see the amount of information required until the end product was done. In my work I would like to follow someone during all the phases that where needed to make this 8 minute video, looking to all the information used.

Permanent captures of temporary information

2009-03-03T10:15:00.001Z

Temporary information recording that becomes permanent by photo capturing. Also an example of notes-to-self that become available to others:

Distraction(s)...

2009-02-23T15:43:00.001Z

... with artefacts that carry a lot of embedded tools and information within them.

Not so long ago (15 years), a PC would carry mainly a set of very restrictive production tools. Today we have a plethora of installed tools (and gadgets) available in our computers, and an open door (internet access) of millions of other available for us to play with and/or install.

How does this affect PIM? How distracted are we? Does this explain, for example, the difficulties of reading an entire PDF on the computer without interrupting to:

open another pdf
find papers from the same author
search database for (new concept found, .... ) before finishing the reading
... constant switching between reading pdf and other (available/competing) information

Are there gender differences in how these distractions affect PIM efforts? Do they have any relation to multitasking?

Gender self-perceived differences in digital literacy

2009-01-21T20:11:00.001Z

Eszter Hargittai & Steven Shafer (2006). Differences in Actual and Perceived Online Skills: The Role of Gender. Social Science Quarterly, Vol. 87(2), pp. 432-448:

"Our data suggest that overall men and women do not differ significantly in their abilities to ﬁnd various types of information online. However, we do ﬁnd that women are much more likely to shortchange themselves when it comes to self-perception of their online skills. The gender effects appear to be significant with respect to self-perceived skill levels. Our ﬁndings are consistent with Correll’s (2001) work, which found that net of actual skills, young women are less likely to perceive themselves as skilled in these domains, which in turn biases their propensity to pursue math- and science-related careers. Similarly, we ﬁnd that net of actual skills, women tend to rate their online skills lower than do men. Women’s lower self-assessment vis-a-vis web-use ability may affect significantly the extent of their online behavior and the types of uses to which they put the medium." (p. 444)

I wonder if this self-perceived skill differences between gender also aply to other skills beyond digital literacy (by David Bawden). For instance, when building their own resumes (CV) do women also shortchange their skills?...

ICT changing the meaning of being «at work»

2009-01-20T09:09:00.001Z

Communication on future networks and the internet (2008), by EU:

"Nomadic use of ICT will challenge the meaning of ‘at work’ Nomadicity will make work patterns less fixed in time and space. This will create major challenges for both employers and employees. Making working life and education more sustainable in terms of working and studying from home intensifies the need for realising the nomadicity that ICT can provide."

On scrapnotes and «technologizing» everything

2008-12-17T10:06:00.001Z

Scrapings or information scraps are little notes that we take in a paper cloth table in a restaurant, a napkin, a post-it, the corner of a magazine or the newspaper, a notebook, but also in del.icio.us bookmarks, text files or whatever is at hand, at the moment.

Maybe the clue to understand scrapings lies not in developing new tools to add to the mash and proliferation of our bits of information, but in understanding that they are part of our own information behaviours for what works in given occasions. For me it seems more relevant to acknowledge it, and incorporate it as a practice that works for individuals, than to see it as a problem that needs a technological solution.

Scrapings are immediate. One takes note of it, with what one has at hand, and makes it immediately available to add meta data to a book we are reading, to glue at the fridge as a reminder or a grocery list that we later take with us, to note down a telephone or the name of the music passing on the radio, a research lead for later reflection, a visual signal, a temporary mark, making eliciting annotations on a paper we are reading, a drawing to complex or simple ideas.

Imagine the time (and problems) it would take for you to make a «simple» scraping in a web application (hardware + internet access + application initiation) while at the supermarket, talking with a colegue on the corridor, having a meal with friends, while driving (or stopping endlessly in IC19 ;)...

Ever notice that in a rush moment, although people have their latest technology mobile phones, in order to exchange contacts either they jot down the contact in a piece of paper, or exchange presentation cards, or they dial the number they are given to stay with that record (and confirm they have noted the number correctly) and only later (if ever) they add more information to the plenty of available labels to fill in their sophisticated «contact managers»?

Let alone the transferability and malleability of such notes, in the end is also about reliability. How many of us have lost your long time acquired contact details due to loss, robbery or malfunction of your telephones (or whatever gadget you used)? How many of us will be able to show our present pictures to our future grandchildren (even with all the available storing capacity, gadgets and backup practices)?...

Makes us think about why with so many available technologies, with all the digital facilities that we have, paper production does not seem to be slowing down and the once envisioned «digital office» couldn't look further apart as paper seems to be the most reliable medium in our PIM (personal information management) practices. Maybe paper is still our long lasting backup and not the other way around.

For a deeper knowldge about scraping, there is a lot to reflect in the Haystack Group of MIT. See also tool: List.it and protocol for conducting observations for interested users.

Quoting online

2008-12-15T11:16:00.001Z

kwout way to quoting via kwout

tools in used - scattered data

2008-12-14T12:11:00.001Z

pulverized data for my research across different tools and plataforms in need of aggregation for my research:

citeUlike - tool used for biblioghraphic collection. Problems encountered through time concern: a) not having access to some of the publications but able to keep reference; b) duplicated items due to encounters in different databases; c) limited or unavailable internet access interfere with information management practices
infotransitions - tool for embedding other tools, work-in-progress, active links, communication with supervisor, thoughts, reflextions & draft writings. Problems encountered through time: a) limited or unavailable internet access interfere with information work behaviour & PIM practices; b) private space does not allow for interactions with peers or people exploring/interested in same topics; c) althought meant as a way for «being» in permanent contact with supervisor, allowing him to «observe» recent research concerns, it's barely used as such
del.icio.us - started to use this tool to allow my «favorites» to be computer independent, and later to help manage team search efforts for project work. Problems limited to unavailable internet access that temper with access and PIM practices.
flickr - Although my main photos & picture are locally stored (my computer, moveable hard drive .... (...)
notebooks - one of the most stable practices I have since I made my first research attemps (back in 1999, expatriation cycle, IPL/ESCS. During the changes that occured in this last year in my working infrastructures (uncertain internet access, reduce mobility & communications due to financial constrains and disapeering workplace & homeplace), I used my notebooks and rely on them much more then before (for noting my private research notes I was using this blog, wich I used also to illicite all the other web spaces I use (wrote above). As a tool it's very portable, no need interfaces to access content, no re-charging needs, it's not an intruder, I can carry it with me all the time. On the negative aspects are the finite space available and the inherited need to change notebooks once I use the last page. The transition for a new book brings me the need to carry during some time 2 notebooks with me... and finding past notes is not always quick. Moving the notes to text adds also aditinal work.

Databases used with existing individual accounts and resources stored at their sites, also add to the pulverization:

citeseerX (a free scientific database, focusing primarily on the literature in computer and information science)
myACM (2 years paid subscription, focusing primarely on computer sciences and dessiminating practices)
Wiley (group publisher, aggregates diverse publishing materials from diferent areas of research)
LibraryThing (some of my personal books with interface for my Amazon aquisitions & account)
[stopped using b-on because I could not store my papers in there, only queries, and also because of problems with exporting found results... and because there are other places I can use to accomplish the job]

(antecipating) Place in mobile work

2008-12-14T11:56:00.001Z

Brown, B. and O’Hara, K. (2003). Place as a practical concern of mobile workers. Environment and Planning, A 35, pp. 1565–1587:

"Mobile workers often need to configure their activies to take account of the different places they find themselves. This can involve considerable ‘juggling’ of their plans, humble office equipment, and their co-workers. In turn mobile workers change places, as they appropriate different sites for their work. Specifically, technology allows for the limited re-appropriation of travel and leisure sites as places for work (such as trains and cafés). Time is also an important practical concern for mobile workers. While mobile work may be seen as relatively flexible, fixed temporal structures allow mobile workers to ‘accomplishment synchronicity ’ with others."

2008-12-11T17:52:00.001Z

Cathy Marshall (2008). rethinking personal digital archiving: part 1 & part 2. D-Lib Magazine, vol.14 (3/4):

"(...) a broadened view of how we might undertake personal digital archiving, both broadly (for consumers) and more narrowly (for academics, scholars, researchers, and students); some of these issues may also carry over into the realm of institutional archiving, although that is not my aim."

link by email from JAC

The myth of the paperless office

2008-12-11T10:20:00.002Z

From a study of 2003, updating the 2000 study and comparing the evolution of estimated information production (paper, film, magnetic, optic)- How much Information?:

"Contrary to notions of paperless offices floated in the late 80s and early 90s, the consumption of office paper has gone up substantially in the recent years, especially following the move to laser/inkjet printers from dot matrix printers. Paper use in offices has further risen with the increasing speed of laser printing coupled with its decreasing cost. Each year, almost 500 billion copies are produced on copiers in the United States; nearly 15 trillion copies are produced on copiers, printers, and multi-function machines. (Source: XeroxParc)."

Opportunities in information behaviour research

2008-12-10T09:33:00.001Z

Vakkari, P. (2008). "Trends and approaches in information behaviour research" Information Research, 13(4) paper 361. [Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/13-4/paper361.html]

"Studies explaining how information behaviour is related to varying actions and contexts generating it, or how the use of various tools or services is related to information behaviour are necessary and can build on the categorizations mentioned. Both types of studies are needed."

infoplace or infospace needs for manipulation

2008-09-26T11:14:00.001+01:00

Borgman, C. L. (2003). Personal digital libraries: Creating individual spaces for innovation. Paper presented at the NSF Workshop on Post-Digital Libraries Initiative Directions, Chatham, MA.:

"Individuals need a “place” or a “space” in which to assemble and manipulate information resources for their own purposes, with flexible tools that they can adapt to their practices, skills, habits, and artistry."

[PDF in D:/Phd/Bib - Info Spaces]

Information overload

2008-09-22T16:35:00.002+01:00

Houghton-Jan, Sarah (2008). Being Wired or Being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope with Information Overload, Ariadne, Issue 56:

"What is information overload? 27 instant messages. 4 text messages. 17 phone calls. 98 work emails. 52 personal emails. 76 email listserv messages. 14 social network messages. 127 social network status updates. 825 RSS feed updates. 30 pages from a book. 5 letters. 11 pieces of junk mail. 1 periodical issue. 3 hours of radio. 1 hour of television. That, my friends, is information overload."

ethics

2008-09-22T16:20:00.001+01:00

Incorporate and adapt for research protocol: ethical issues related with participants. See Amy Bruckman (2002) Ethical Guidelines for Research Online, available online.

the knowledge worker information behaviour

2008-09-15T23:09:00.001+01:00

Kidd, A. (1994). The marks are on the knowledge worker. In CHI '94: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 186-191, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press:

"Knowledge workers do not carry much written information with them when they travel and rarely consult their filed information when working in their offices. Their desks are cluttered and seemingly function as a spatial holding pattern for current inputs and ideas." [186]

"It seems that knowledge workers use physical space, such as desks or floors, as a temporary holding pattern for inputs and ideas which they cannot yet categorise or even decide how they might use (...)" [p. 187]

Most of what the author talks, back in 1994, reasons with my own observations, namely what concerns clutter desks, use of floor space and sense of order out of (apparent) disorder corresponds with the descriptions and transcripts of what was observed 15 years ago.

IS & ethnographic research

2008-09-12T18:50:00.001+01:00

Myers, M. (1999). Investigating information systems with ethnographic research, Communications of AIS, vol. 2(4).

Information Literate & Logo

2008-08-12T11:28:00.001+01:00

Information Literacy Logo and definition of «information literate person»:

"To be information literate, a person must be able to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information. The information literate individuals are those who have learned how to learn” (ALA, 1998)

More details and glossary in Guidelines on Information literacy for Lifelong learning (Final draft by Jesús Lau), namely difference between skills and competencies.

on the use of «labels» for writing research

2008-07-04T11:38:00.001+01:00

McKechnie, L., Julien, H., Pecoskie, J.L. & Dixon, C.M. (2006). The presentation of the information user in reports of information behaviour research. Information Research, 12(1) paper 278 [Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/12-1/paper278.html]:

"(...) the terms partner and participant, may perhaps be regarded as the most inclusive of all as they construct the individual as a member of the research team and an active player in the research process."

When addressing participants in a research, McKechnie et al (2006) suggest to use the words «participants» or «partners» since it acknowledges their active paper in the research process and denotes a more centralized role in the research than the use of words such as «subjects» or «objects» that distance the researched from the research. Also, there was a correlation with the data collection methods used where the participant label was used:

"The important role of the user or research participant was evident in the method section of some of the papers. Some data collection practices reported by authors were designed to bring, and were effective at bringing, researchers closer to users and capturing their perspectives. These included open-ended interviews, face-to-face interviews, close interaction over an extended period of time, audio-recording of interviews, full transcription of audio-recorded interviews and participant checking. Conversely, data collection practices such as transaction log analysis or the use of secondary survey data served to distance the researcher from the researched."

The core of the paper is concerned not only with the labels a researcher uses, but how this labels might reflect how the researcher sees the participants. To be avoided, specially if one is using the qualitative paradigm, reports that address participants by numbers, by letters, by pie charts, etc., not giving voice to the participants.

This is one of the differences that might be an issue when presenting my research in an engineers context. They might say that I used a lot of quotations and little aggregated information. Also, it may reflect how I see the world of engineers: my pre-conceptions of what it is expected of my research in the context of the Department I'm going to present my PhD.

The Petabyte Age

2008-06-27T09:12:00.001+01:00

To reflect and provoke!

In the last Wired News, The Petabyte Age: Because More Isn't Just More — More Is Different, they have an entry about «The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete».

So where is the method? The scientific rigour? If what they state was true, than scientist would be obsolete. Scientific method is not only about finding correlations in data. The scientific method allows for a number of triangulations: data, methods & theory. Scientific method starts from choosing what kind of data to look for, how to collect it, how to analyze, how to interpret the data.

Anyhow, it shows that the perception that having access to large amounts of data can suffice to make science :S

Infrastructure for interoperability

2008-04-17T10:50:00.001+01:00

Global Research Library 2020 - Goals & Objectives:

"Either as individual institutions or a part of consortia, we are all working on improving existing (local) infrastructures and establishing new systems, but moving forward we need to be absolutely certain that these effort are all tightly-linked and easily interoperable (e.g. leveraging community protocols, suites of standards, etc). Infrastructure is used here to include people with appropriate skill sets, systems, standards and protocol suites, and even policy frameworks."

Homo mobilis

2008-04-15T11:13:00.001+01:00

Rich Ling disponibilizou as ligações para os capítulos do relatório especial do Economist sobre Mobile Communication:

Inscrevi-me no Grupo «Mobile Communication» e através do link de um dos membros (Carsten Sørensen) do qual já tinha conhecimento através de artigos publicados, fui dar à Research Network for Mobile Interaction & Pervasive Social Devices.

Tracking Transition

2008-04-03T21:04:00.001+01:00

Houston, Muir (2008). Tracking Transition: Issues in Asynchronous E-Mail Interviewing, FQS, vol 9(2):

"(...) the transition to employment is only one of a number of possible transitions which the individual may experience upon leaving university and as noted above these are not necessarily mutually exclusive events, but often exhibit a degree of interaction between the various transitions."

"(...) a number of transitions may simultaneously be in operation: that of status (undergraduate to graduate); in terms of accommodation, living arrangements and even location of domicile; and, in terms of activity (undergraduate to post-graduate or from part-time to full-time work or from student to employee). In the case of some of the respondents as noted by comments above, the transitions were not always unproblematic. Moreover, for some of the respondents, the transition especially in relation to independent living was conditioned by a lack of financial resources and this could impact on relationships with partners and parents."

memex

2008-03-16T12:37:00.001Z

Vannevar Bush (1945). As We May Think. The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 176(1), pp. 101-108.

Drawing of Bush's theoretical memex machine was published in Life Magazine, November 19, 1945, vol. 19(11), p. 123, also under the title «As we may think». Since I have not found an image of the original article, I'll use the one circulating in many different places that have paid homage to Bush vision.

PS - From Memex To Hypertext arrived (same picture in p. 109)

ecotone

2008-03-08T19:24:00.001Z

Uma boa metáfora para explicar espaços de transição. Neste caso, a palavra «ecotone» serviria para explicar espaços de transição próximos. Notei que as palavras «edge» e «boundary» também são utilizadas como sinónimos em algumas das definições.

Define: ecotone

"A narrow and fairly sharply defined transition zone between two or more different communities. Such edge communities are typically species-rich. (Allaby 1998)" www.oup.com.au/orc/demo_glossary.aspx

genetics as «pure information»

2008-02-28T23:59:00.001Z

Edge: LIFE: a gene-centric view, by Craig Venter & Richard Dawkins, in a conversation in Munich:

"RICHARD DAWKINS: What has happened is that genetics has become a branch of information technology. It is pure information. It's digital information. It's precisely the kind of information that can be translated digit for digit, byte for byte, into any other kind of information and then translated back again. This is a major revolution. I suppose it's probably 'the' major revolution in the whole history of our understanding of ourselves."

PIM - 10 years after first study

2008-02-25T15:40:00.001Z

Barreau, D. (2008). The persistence of behavior and form in the organization of personal information. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, vol. 59(2), pp. 307-317:

"This study revisits managers who were first interviewed more than 10 years ago to identify their personal information management (PIM) behaviors. The purpose of this study was to see how advances in technology and access to the Web may have affected their PIM behaviors. PIM behaviors seem to have changed little over time, suggesting that technological advances are less important in determining how individuals organize and use information than are the tasks that they perform. Managers identified increased volume of e-mail and the frustration with having to access multiple systems with different, unsynchronized passwords as their greatest PIM challenges. Organizational implications are discussed."

downsizing & (in)communication at work

2008-02-21T16:32:00.001Z

Kwon, D.; Oh, W. & Jeon, S. (2007). Broken Ties: The Impact of Organizational Restructuring on the Stability of Information-Processing Networks. Journal of Management Information Systems, vol. 24(1), pp. 201–231:

"We pay special attention to the structural capability of each IPN in the context of corporate downsizing, because downsizing is a common phenomenon in contemporary organizations that dynamically reconfigures the means by which people process information both within and across firm boundaries. Moreover, emphasis is placed on the specific contexts in which workforce reduction leads to concomitant increases in information processing and communication responsibilities for those remaining (i.e., “survivors”), and may thus produce adverse effects such as work overload and “burnout.”" (p.202)

"(...) one underlying presumption shared by these various conceptual approaches is that organizations are information-processing entities whose survival and longevity largely depend upon how efficiently and effectively they handle information within and across firm boundaries" (p.204)

implosion of the world on the individual

2008-01-10T21:27:00.001Z

Janelle, D. G. and Gillespie, A. (2004). Space-time constructs for linking information and communication technologies with issues in sustainable transportation. Transport Reviews, vol. 24(6), pp. 665-677.

"Human extensibility and the implosion of the world on the individual (time-space compression) represent simultaneously opportunity and threat - the opportunity to communicate and engage in dialogue and commerce, and the threat of besiegement and incapacity to absorb or cope with relentless volumes of information calling for attention. Clearly, the temporal aspects of this problem require abilities to engage and disengage in one's connectivity to the world - to network selectively or to broadcast universally, as required."

Information Scraps

2008-01-09T20:42:00.001Z

Bernstein et al (2007). Information Scraps: How and Why Information Eludes our Personal Information Management Tools (in Submission version):

"In this paper we describe information scraps -- a class of personal information whose content is scribbled on Post-it notes, scrawled on corners of random sheets of paper, buried inside the bodies of e-mail messages sent to ourselves, or typed haphazardly into text files. Information scraps hold our great ideas, sketches, notes, reminders, driving directions, and even our poetry."

Recover list - on campus:

2008-01-04T17:56:00.001Z

Lansdale, M. (1988). The psychology of personal information management. Applied Ergonomics, 19(1):55-66.