Encyclopedic Media: some review points

1. Designer's Stance:

- maximize the medium: more coherent, more expressive

- maximize the core task, as divorced from legacy media

 

2.Starting with Domain:

- Generate large divisions

- Generate general user tasks

- Make more fine-grained:

- division of divisions: document types and segmentation

- division of users: multiple views

 

3. Starting with pile of documents

- sort

- catagorize

- segment

- label

 

4. Overview power

- Should provide support for multiple users

- Should provide intellectual access to material

- Should summarize the domain for the new user

 

4. Kaleidoscopic View

- Not a mosaic: multiple arrangements, and the transitions among them

- Vannevar Bush's many trails: complexity

- George Landow's decentered, multivocal landscape

- Bowker and Star's emphasis on link between making visible/making invisible; making visible/regulating: mindful design

- Result: complex and multiple, with ability to move between the two

 

5. Promise of XML

- "semantic" web: access at multiple levels of granularity, automated

- distributed indexing (many people at distance from one another, using common methodology)