In her recent editorial, In Defense of the Power of Paper, Phyllis Korkk quotes Richard H. R. Harper saying:
Reading a long document on paper rather than on a computer screen helps people “better understand the geography of the argument contained within,” said Richard H. R. Harper, a principal researcher for Microsoft in Cambridge, England, and co-author with Abigail J. Sellen of “The Myth of the Paperless Office,” published in 2001.
Today’s workers are often navigating through multiple objects in complex ways and creating new documents as well, Mr. Harper said. Using more than one computer screen can be helpful for all this cognitive juggling. But when workers are going back and forth between points in a longer document, it can be more efficient to read on paper, he said. (emphasis added)
To “…understand the geography of the argument….”
I rather like that.
For all the debates about pointing, response codes, locators, identifiers, etc., on the web, all that was every at stake was document as blob.
Our “document as blob” schemes missed:
- Complex complex relationships between documents
- Tracking influences on both authors and readers
- Their continuing but changing roles in the social life of information, and
- The geography of arguments they contain (with at least as much complexity as documents as blobs).
Others may not be interested in the geography of arguments/information in your documents.
What about you?
Topic maps can help you break the “document as blob” barrier.
With topic maps you can plot the geography of/in your documents.
Interested?