April

Photo by Monica Pinheiro, free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA ( CC ).

Role of paper in disruptions

After being hacked and down for 3 days, the newspaper "Expresso volta a ser feito e desenhado à mão. Como no primeiro dia." by Expresso in LinkedIn.

June

 

"Whether in the case of donor-supported schemes or government-supported tree-based restoration interventions, it is crucial that sustainable financing solutions for such projects go beyond the planting stage. This can only be achieved if the scope of the restoration intervention is seen as a process beyond tree planting that requires more investment to ensure the planted seedlings also grow to be trees." See figure 1, page 12. Duguma L, Minang P, Aynekulu E, Carsan S, Nzyoka J, Bah A, Jamnadass R. 2020. From Tree Planting to Tree Growing: Rethinking Ecosystem Restoration Through Trees. ICRAF Working Paper No 304. World Agroforestry. Photograph by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

increasing diversity

Increasing plants diversity helps to attract other animals, including arthropods that seem to favor genetics-based interactions among plants, pathogens, and herbivores. See results from global synthesis of the effects of diversified farming systems on arthropod diversity within fields and across agricultural landscapes (2017, Global Change Biology). Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

Accepted

«We are pleased to inform you that your submission to the Internet Technologies & Society 2013 Conference (ITS 2013) has been accepted as a "Full Paper"»:

Pinheiro, M., Cardoso, M., Barrulas, M. J., and Carvalho, J. A. (2013). Some things I tend to overlap even if not necessary. A discussion on PIM artifacts between researcher and research agent. In International Conference on Internet Technologies & Society.

plain paper artefact

Scrapings by a participant to register important temporary information as an auxiliary to perform a future task. Different types of registered information include: words, numbers, drawings, ideas, standards, to-buy-list and instruction details and measures for performing the future task.

Registering in plain paper artefact, June 2011

On TheBrain page they say: "With PersonalBrain you're never more than a few seconds away from any piece of digital information. Web pages, documents, images, notes... From people and projects to ideas and task lists, it's all there in an instant." What are the assumptions behind this declaration?

1. You always have with you the hardware needed for access;
2. You have the software installed in all the hardware you carry with you, when you need to access;
3. You always have internet access, to use the software installed in all the hardware you have with you, when you need to access; 
4. You will have time to edit all your pieces of digital information with «PersonalBrain» and send always the last version of that «brain» to all the hardware gadgets you use when you need to access it;
5. You will never run out of battery/energy when you need to access!

Even without discussing and going into «Knowledge Management Software» (*), there's a lot of «layers» one needs to have in order to use that metaphoric «digital brain». With paper mind maps, even a paper restaurant towel or napkin will do. This to say, like many other surrogate IT tools we find, sometimes the number of layers needed for using them, make them far more expensive and time consuming, then their counter more traditional tools.

Forgot to mention, I'm a user of mind maps. Read about radial thinking (Buzan & Buzan), started mind mapping in 1999, using paper, pen and colors, and around 2002 also started using software. In 2005 even gave workshops for people interested in mind maps in my working place. So I guess I can be considered a fan of mind maps. The immediacy you get with paper and pen is not substituted with digital equivalent canvas for mind mapping. But the ease you get when in need of changes and the added value of incorporating digital files and links, it's very easy to do. Any how, they complement but do not substitute each other.

(*) Mind maps, either paper and pencil or digital, are «tools» to help us visualize our ideias and connect them. They try to mirror the way our brains organize information, in what's is called radial thinking. Mind maps and concept maps are not the same thing. Mind maps are organized in branches, like a tree. Concept maps, do not follow a tree structure to organize information, but instead show connections between concepts. The effort you put into constructing them, according to your personal knowledge, is what makes them so powerful  to visualize all the connections in what can be just a page! But you'll have to do it, or else you'll have just a catalog or reference work that you still do not know what's inside. 

Indústria do Papel

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.

EIF for EU

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."

weblog as PIM tool

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)

paper in knowledge work

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]