In my yesterday’s post on Blogging as creating space for important I mentioned that “I can go into a body of research on how artefacts support thinking and knowledge creation, but I wouldn’t”. Well, BensonBear asks to do so:
No, please go into the body of reasearch on how artefacts support thinking. Perhaps point to a survey paper? If you are not familiar, look up Andy Clark’s work in philosophy of mind on “linguistic scaffolding”.
Don’t think that I’m ready for a proper literature review :) Actually, my thinking on roles, interplay and affordances of physical and digital artefacts in thinking and communication is heavily based on knowledge work/personal information management research – studies indicating how paper and digital documents, as well as their organisation in time and space support thinking and communication.
A good way to start it to read these:
- Kidd, A. (1994). The marks are on the knowledge worker (.pdf). Proceedings of CHI ‘94. Boston: ACM Press.
- Sellen, A. J., & Harper, R. H. R. (2001). The Myth of the Paperless Office. The MIT Press.
The first one is a good introduction to the role of documents for informing thinking (~ turning information into knowledge). The second is a must read book for many reasons, but especially for understanding the role of paper and digital documents at work.
Personal information management is a more complicated issue – there is a lot of interesting things to read there. A good overview could be found in
- Boardman, R. & Sasse, M. A. (2004): “Stuff goes into the computer and doesn’t come out”: a cross-tool study of personal information management (.pdf). Proceedings of CHI 2004, Vienna, Austria, April 20-24, pp. 583-590.
In fact, Richard Boardman keeps PIM bibliography and finished his PhD on PIM in 2004, so his dissertation is a very good starting point for the topic (I’m reading it :). Unfortunately, his site is down at the moment and I have no idea if it’s permanent or not.
The proposal of BensonBear seems to complement my current reading pretty well, as I didn’t look much into the literature on cognitive processes that would explain why reliance on artefacts (as observed in PIM literature) happens.
I looked at papers by Andy Clark and this one seems to be relevant:
- Clark, A. (1998). Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation (.pdf). P. Carruthers and J. Boucher (Eds) Language And Thought: Interdisciplinary Themes. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1998, pp. 62-183.
I just scanned it, but especially this seems to be very relevant – “six broad ways in which linguistic artifacts can complement the activity of pattern-completing brain”:
- Memory augmentation
- Environmental simplification
- Coordination and the reduction of online-deliberation
- Taming path-dependent learning
- Attention and resource allocation
- Data manipulation and representation
I know that these sounds a bit too scientific, but I didn’t have enough time to read the paper properly to add human-readable commentaries :)
Anyway, if you know more research relevant, please, let me know.
Tags: articulation, knowledge representations, personal knowledge managementArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/02/22.html#a1501; comments are here.
Related posts