Deborah Barreau Rob Capra
206 Manning Hall IDL-Manning Hall
Office Hours: Tuesday and Wednesday, 10:00-12:00 Tuesday, 4:00-6:00p.m., Thursday, 2:00-4:00p.m.
Other times by appointment or when the door is open Telephone: 919-962-8274
Telephone: 919-966-5042
Text (recommended, but not required):
Personal Information Management, edited by William Jones and Jaime Teevan. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007.
Overview
Personal Information Mangagement (PIM) is the study of how people organize and manage information in their daily lives, including to-do lists, calendars, email, address books, and file management. In today's digital age, many devices including cell phones, computers, PDAs, and music players play a role in PIM. This course will focus on major issues in PIM research, including information organization, human cognitive and memory issues, task continuity across devices, mental models of information, usability issues, and the role of technology in PIM. The course will be structured as a readings and discussion seminar with a semester-long research project. Students will become familiar with current PIM research and will design and implement a research study of PIM. Students will also prepare “a day in the life of my PIM” presentations to share aspects of their own personal information management techniques and challenges and to stimulate classroom discussion.
Assignments and Grading
Assignments consist of a walk through personal information space (15%), the evaluation of a personal information management tool (15%), a project (individual or group)(35% on the project, 5% on your presentation of the project), and your participation in class based upon reading and discussion (30%). We will discuss these requirements in class - students will demonstrate tools and illustrate walk through of personal space throughout the semester. Project demonstrations will occur on the reading day, December 4.
Outline
1. Introduction and Background, Part I: Defining PIM, August 21
Reading:
Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. Atlantic Monthly (July).
2. Introduction and Background, Part II: Early Research and Early Tools, August 28
Reading:
Lansdale, M. (1988). The psychology of personal information management. Applied Ergonomics, 19 (1):55-66.
Malone, T.W. (1983). How do people organize their desks: implications for the design of office information systems. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 1 (1):99-112.
Barreau, D.K. and Nardi, B. (1995). Finding and reminding: file organization from the desktop. SIGCHI Bulletin ,27(3):39-43.
3. PIM Functions, Part I: Finding and Refinding, September 4
Reading:
Capra, R. and Perez-Quinones, M.A. (2005). Using Web search engines to find and refind information. IEEE Computer, 38(10):36-42.
Teevan, J., Capra, R., and Perez-Quinones, M.A. (2007). How People Find Personal Information. In Jones, W. and Teevan, J. (Eds.) Personal Information Management. University of Washington Press.
4. PIM Functions, Part II: Keeping and Reminding, September 11
Reading:
Marshall, C.C. and Jones, W. (2006). Keeping encountered information. Communications of the ACM, 49 (1):66-67.
Bernstein, M., Van Kleek, M., and Karger, D. (2008). Information scraps: how and why information eludes our personal information management tools. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems Special Issue on the Keeping, Refinding, and Sharing of Personal Information. (to appear October).
5. PIM Functions, Part III: Organizing, Managing, Using, September 18
Reading:
Shipman, F.M. & Marshall, C.C. (1999). Formality considered harmful: experiences, emerging themes, and directions on the use of formal representations in interactive systems. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 8: 333-352.
Kwasnik, B. H. (1991). The importance of factors that are not document attributes in the organization of personal documents. Journal of Documentation, 47: 389-398.
6. PIM Applications and Tools, Part I: Email, September 25
Reading:
Whittaker, S., Belloti, V., and Gwizdka, J. (2006). Email in personal information management. Communications of the ACM, 49 (1):68-73.
Whittaker, S. & Sidner, C. (1996). Email overload: exploring personal information management of email. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Common Ground: 276-283.
Fisher, D., Brush, A.J. Gleave, E., and Smith, M.A. (2006). Revisiting Whittaker & Sidner's "email overload" ten years later. Proceedings of the 2006, 20th Anniversary, Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work: 309-312.
7. PIM Applications and Tools, Part II: Calendaring, To-Do Lists, Bookmarks, File management, Other, October 2
Reading:
Boardman, R. and Sasse, M.A. (2004). “Stuff goes into the computer but doesn’t come out:” a cross-tool study of personal information management. Proceedings of CHI: 583-590.
Ravasio, P., Schar, S.G., and Krueger, H. (2004). In pursuit of desktop evolution: User problems and practices with modern desktop systems. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 11 (2):156-180.
8. Contexts for PIM, Part I: Home and School, October 9
Reading:
Razavi, M. N. and Iverson, L. 2006. A grounded theory of information sharing behavior in a personal learning space. In Proceedings of the 2006 20th Anniversary Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Banff, Alberta, Canada, November 04 - 08, 2006). CSCW '06.
Dumais, S., Cutrell, E., Cadiz, J., Jancke, G., Sarin, R., and Robbins, D. C. 2003. Stuff I've seen: a system for personal information retrieval and re-use. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual international ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in informaion Retrieval (Toronto, Canada, July 28 - August 01, 2003). SIGIR '03.
NO CLASS ON OCTOBER 16: FALL BREAK
9. Contexts for PIM, Part II: Work, October 23
Reading:
Neumann, L. (1999). Paper, piles, and computer files: a folklore of information work environments. Library Trends, 47 (3): 439-469.
Barreau, D.K. (2008). The persistence of behavior and form in the organization of personal information. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59 (2):307-317.
10. Contexts for PIM, Part III: Play and shared contexts, October 30
Reading:
Czerwinski, M., Gage, D.W., Gemmell, J., Marshall, C.C., Perez-Quinones, M.A., Skeels, M.M., and Catarci, T. (2006). Digital memories in an era of ubiquitous computing and abundant storage.
Stebbins, R.A. (2005). Project-based leisure: theoretical neglect of a common use of free time. Leisure Studies, 24 (1):1-11.
Bergman, O., Beyth-Marom, R., and Nachmias, R. 2006. The project fragmentation problem in personal information management. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montréal, Québec, Canada, April 22 - 27, 2006).
11. Organizational challenges for PIM, Part I: Knowledge management, November 6
Reading:
Ackerman, M.S. & Halverson, C.A. (2000). Reexamining organizational memory. Communications of the ACM, 43 (1): 59-64.
Ducheneaut, N. & Bellotti, V. (2001). Email as habitat: an exploration of embedded personal information management. Interactions, Sept/Oct:30-38.
12. Organizational challenges for PIM, Part II: Archives management, November 13
Reading:
Erickson, T. 2006. From PIM to GIM: personal information management in group contexts. Communications of the ACM, 49 (1) (Jan. 2006), 74-75. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1107458.1107495
Lutters, W.G., Ackerman, M.S., et al. Group information management. In In Jones, W. and Teevan, J. (Eds.) Personal Information Management. University of Washington Press. 2007.
13. Global Issues, November 20
Reading:
Karat, C., Brodie, C., and Karat, J. 2006. Usable privacy and security for personal information management. Communications of the ACM, (49) 1 (Jan. 2006), 56-57. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1107458.1107491
Pratt, W., Unruh, K., Civan, A., and Skeels, M. M. 2006. Personal health information management. Communications of the ACM, (49) 1 (Jan. 2006), 51-55. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1107458.1107490
NO CLASS NOVEMBER 27: THANKSGIVING
14. Student presentations, December 4