Reading and Writing the Electronic Book

Catherine C. Marshall

Clippings (with some notes and paraphrasing) of the most important ideas in the book; prepared by Ahmed Kharrufa

Chapter Two: Reading

Purposes and types of reading

There are different types of reading which are usually determined by the purpose of reading. Among the most common purposes of reading are

• To learn
• To support discussions
• To answer questions
• To edit or critically review text

Among the common types of reading are

Type	Purpose
Reading	comprehension
Skimming	get the gist
Scanning	decide on further action
Glancing	detect important page elements
Seeking	scans quickly for a particular page element
Rereading

Re-reading across multiple venues should hold a prominent position in the taxonomy of reading types.

Layout and Typography

While in printed books the layout is fixed, in electronic books, and specially with formats like HTML that do not impose a fixed page formats (i.e., like PDF), the final layout of the electronic book is produced through an interaction among three factors

• The content representation (i.e. some initial layout guidelines such as styles)
• The book reader software
• Reader controlled settings (i.e. changing the size of the browser window, or the display font size).

Questions to think about

• Does the way the words are presented on the page have any effect on the speed with which readers make their way through the text or on their comprehension of its content?
• Do these design principles change readers’ immediate reaction to the content?
• Is an argument more persuasive if the page is well laid out?

A number of researchers have tried to find answers to such questions, but we ended up with rather contradicting findings:

One study showed that: the optimal use of white space affected both reading speed and text comprehension: subjects read the text with margins more slowly but comprehended it better. If a document is more pleasant to read, subjects will spend longer reading it and will score better on measures of comprehension. Optimal leading (line spacing), on the other hand had no effect on performance, but subjects preferred it over text prepared with suboptimal (i.e. no) leading

But another showed that: Readers preferred nice layout, but it did not change their ability to take in what was on the page. The application of good type design principles had even less effect: subjects did not notice them to appreciate them.

Good rendering (e.g. the use of good antialiasing techniques) slightly improves speed and comprehension.

Page 33 “In the end, when we contemplate the results of these studies, we find that lab subjects prefer nicely laid-out text, although the legibility enhancements provided by rendering techniques and layout do not result in corresponding increases in reading performance. In the field, what we see is more complex. There are trade-offs introduced by good layout: fewer words fit on the screen; hence (because there isn’t as much of the text available to quickly refer back to or to glance forward at).”

In short, it can safely be said that:

Better layout and rendering -> better mood -> better performance

Font related matters

Sanserif (Arial like) fonts are more eligible than serif (Times like) fonts on screen.

Samples of fonts designed for on-screen reading:

Verdana: The fonts Verdana, Georgia, and Trebuchet are designed to meet the needs of on-screen readers

Trebuchet: The fonts Verdana, Georgia, and Trebuchet are designed to meet the needs of on-screen readers

Georgia: The fonts Verdana, Georgia, and Trebuchet are designed to meet the needs of on-screen readers

Chapter Three: Interaction

Annotation

People use annotations to

• Focus attention
• Signal for future attention
• Augment and aid memory
• Help solve a problem
• Interpretation and reflection
• Actively engage with a concept

Page 40: “Researchers have generally agreed that annotations can be a valuable artifact that reflects a reader’s engagement with and understanding of a text, an artifact that may persist beyond the immediate reading… reader annotations should not be tied to the particular eBook software that was used to produce them. Hence, it is important to develop uniform terminology for annotations and to represent them consistently.”

What is becoming obvious now is that annotations should persist across devices and across specific copies of a document

A nice side note: aquote from Baudrillard 1996, pp.32-33

“The compact disc. It doesn’t wear out, even if you use it. Terrifying. It’s as though you’d never used it. So it’s as though you didn’t exist. If things don’t get old anymore, then that’s because it’s you who are dead”

This might lead to the conclusion that there is some sense in electronically showing wear effect

Anatomy of annotations

In general annotations have three elements

• Body (the actual text for a textual notes)
• Anchor (The selection range that the body refers to or just a highlight)
• Marker (The appearance of the anchor. E.g. its color)

In addition the annotation may have meta-data like creator and time.

e.g.: A highlight has an anchor and marker but no body

Typical frequency of annotation usage

Anchor-only (underlines and highlights) 83.1%

Body only (marginal text and symbols) 6.5%

Body + Anchor 9.0%

Navigation

Navigation is interwined with the act of reading; at best, it is both essential and invisible.

It is possible to think of navigation as having two different components:

• Moving: the ability to move around in the material, and
• Orientation: the ability to stay oriented (knowing where you are in a document)

Each of these is more complex than one may think at first.

Moving around

Using hypertextual jumps as opposed to sequentially going through a material can lead to entirely different outcomes. If hypertextual jumps are used , one may entirely skip an element (such as a photo) that may attracts ones attention to an article and consequently lead to reading the article. Skipping an article by turning its pages quickly has a different overall effect than skipping to the next article using a link.

Orientation

While navigation asks the question “how do I get there?”, orientation asks the question “where am I now?”

It can be at different scopes

• Library wise:

o which book am I reading?

o Which part of the collection is it from?

• Book wise:

o Where am I in the book?

o How much of the chapter is left?

o What else is in this book?

Clipping

Like annotation, clipping (cutting out pieces from a document) is a fundamental way that we should expect people to interact with electronic publications including eBooks. It is important to translate clippings’ functions and roles into requirements for eBook applications. Like annotation tools, clipping tools need to be very well integrated with reading so that this kind of unselfconscious secondary interaction – clipping – can be performed without seriously interrupting the primary one.

Reasons for clipping

Reason	%
Social/shared	41%
Reference	28%
Reminder for action	14%
Evoke memories	11%
Other use	6%

Among the main uses of clipping are for sharing. That clippings are used collaboratively implies a need to extend collaborative tools to work in the preferred reading environment. Such a secondary interaction (sharing the clip) should take place in a manner that doesn’t interrupt the primary one (reading). Many designers have learned this lesson where it is possible to send a document right from the application’s main menu.

Bookmarking

It might be best to consider bookmarks as a kind of annotation (or vice versa) and to treat them in a similar fashion because they introduce the same design and implementation questions:

Are they stored with the book, in a separate local store, or in a central database?

Because some bookmarks can themselves be contents (placing a picture of a certain subject to bookmark a page in a related chapter), it is possible to see bookmarks as having the same general anatomy as an annotation:

• body (which is usually null, unless the bookmark has description or content),
• anchor (where is the bookmark pointing to), and
• marker (the presentation of the bookmark).

Chapter Four: Reading as a Social Activity

Reading together

Shared Focus

When people read together in a structured situation, they frequently refer to the material they have read (and possibly annotated). This creates an immediate and pressing problem of shared reference: how does everyone in the discussion know that they’re looking at the same thing? Shared reference is a persistent problem, even given stable print editions although the problem is exacerbated when the copies differ for some reason – a different edition of the work has been read or an eBook has been reformatted according to display constraints

Readers rely on complete context rather than disaggregated parts. Although there are shortcuts to sharing a view of a single document, these shortcuts would have removed the reading group members’ ability to see their own annotations and notes in context.

Collaborative Search and Reference Following

Exploratory search effectiveness is enhanced by collaboration.

Reading together as an informal act

When people read in public places, it may be the occasion for social interaction.

Sharing the artifacts of reading

Artifacts of reading are tangible records that persist across time and space. These artifacts include intentional records, such as

• annotations,
• clippings,
• bookmarks,
• notes, and
• other purposeful things that reader has created while she was reading,

In addition to implicit records of reading that have been recorded by the eBook software that include logged events such as

• page turns,
• scrolls,
• opening and closing books,
• mouse clicks, and so on.

Often, implicit records are referred to as telemetry because they allow someone to measure or observe the reading activity at a distance or at another time (or both).

Reading to know what other people know

People want to know what other people know: in other words, they want to be in sync socially.

Sharing annotations

Although sharing annotations is something useful, many factors come into play regarding the ability/rights to share annotations.

Aggregating Annotations: The wisdom of crowds.

An interesting idea is to identify common annotations among multiple readers to mark important areas in a document based on the “wisdom of the crowds”. In other words, if a certain area of the book is widely annotated, or if a number of readers had added textual notes with some common keywords in similar pages, then these areas of the books or these notes must be of some specific importance.

Sharing encountered information

Sometimes the act of sharing is more important than the specific content that is shared. People share information for many reasons:

• to keep in touch or develop rapport;
• for mutual awareness;
• to educate the recipient;
• to strengthen social ties (usually by demonstrating knowledge of the recipient’s interests);
• for some combination of these reasons.

Sharing for mutual awareness is a common practice in the workplace, and

Sharing clippings to educate the recipient is also common.

It is important to remember that the recipient may give an entirely different account of why they think they have received something than from the reason the reader give for sending it.

Chapter Five: Studying Reading

Chapter Six: Content: Markup and Genres

Check http://www.openebook.org

Standard Efforts,

Open Publication Structure

Open Packaging Format Specification

Open Container Format (which wraps DRM info as well)

Chapter Seven: Beyond the Book

Check Wordle tool for content visualization (http://www.wordle.net/)

Search at the library collection level

Collection-level search may be used

· To locate a specific item,

· To re-find an item, or

· in service of an exploratory task.

Re-encounter

I found re-encounter to be a very interesting subject.

People deliberately put printed material (books, clippings, and so on) in places in the physical world so they will see them again without having to remember to look for them.

Sometimes one puts something in a specific place because he doesn’t expect to remember to look at it; rather, he fully expects to re-encounter it when doing a specific task (like looking into a briefcase, or looking at the fridge door)

Staging potential re-encounters with digital materials is more difficult than staging the comparable re-encounter with physical items. With digital technology you are more likely to find exactly what you want and are less likely to run into something you’ve left in a remote corner of your personal digital library.

Understanding the role of re-encounter, and the way re-encounter works in the physical world presents us with an opportunity to move beyond current metaphors for presenting and manipulating stored personal digital library content.

Gathering and Triage

Gathering is a counterpart to annotation. Annotations may represent within-document interpretation; gathering and triage (sorting according to more specific criteria) represent the interpretation of the relevant documents relative to one another.

It is important to record where the material that readers have gathered came from, and it is equally important for readers to be able to informally express why they have kept it. In other words, a reader should be able to say, “this is the most significant thing I found” or “I’m only going to read this if I have time” as easily as it is for her to say what the material is about.

The Visual Knowledge Builder (VKB - http://ensemble.tamu.edu/vkb/) and Tinderbox (http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/ ) are good current examples of applications designed to support gathering and triage.

Tools used to organize information shape the process in crucial ways. Studies found that given fewer organizing tools, participants read more; given a spatial overview and the ability to create hierarchies, they organized more.

Supporting browsing with computed visualizations

Students prefer “overview + detail” interfaces; they work somewhat faster using the fisheye overview, but as with other methods that put more information in front of a person without regard to how pleasant it is to look at, people worked quickly but were less accurate.

The best interface in terms of usability, performance, and reader satisfaction is one that provides a detailed look at the item in focus, presumably a page view, and an overview of the page’s position in the document structure. Similarly, extending this finding to a collection or personal library, the reader should be able to see the eBook in focus, coupled with an overview of the collection.

Metadata for personal digital libraries

Personal library visualizations may be enhanced by choosing techniques that make good use of records of reading and interaction in addition to other per eBook metadata. To do so, we can conceive of every interaction within a personal digital library as forming a persistent record. On its own, each record-each annotation, each clipping, each log entry-doesn’t have much value. But taken together, these records may form a personal geography of one’s own collection of reading materials.

Git and GitHub quick reminders

To commit changes locally then push them to GitHub

1- cd (surround the path with "")

2- "git branch" to make sure you are working on the right branch

2- "git status -s" check the current status

3- "git add ." add all in current and sub dirs

4- "git commit -m "message""

5- "git push origin branchName"

6- Enter the password, and that's it

Creating a branch:

1- "git clone git@github.com:repository" to download a local copy of the main branch

2- modify the files or copy newer files over the the cloned one

3- "git branch newBranchName" create a new branch

4- "git checkout newBranchName" switch to the new branch

5- work normaly on the new branch

Descriptive vs Normative

Most text is copied and pasted from the following links:

http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/phil/blfaq_phileth_cat.htm

http://lamar.colostate.edu/~kmcshane/345/345HandoutNormativeDescriptive.pdf

wikipedia

Descriptive

Descriptive claims describe (say how the world in fact is/was/will be).

Examples in ethics:

• 60% of people think that it is bad to lie.
• The Ten Commandments tell us not to lie.
• Do people think that lying is wrong?
• What do the Ten Commandments tell us about lying?

Descriptive ethics involves describing how people behave and/or what sorts of moral standards they claim to follow. It incorporates research from the fields of anthropology, psychology, sociology and history as part of the process of understanding what people do or have believed about moral norms. Anthropologists and sociologists can provide us with all sorts of information about how societies past and present have structured moral standards and how they have expected people to behave. Psychologists can study how a person's conscience develops and how that person goes about actually making moral choices in real or hypothetical situations.

Descriptive science is used to identify a category of science and distinguish it from other categories of science. The exact demarcation line can vary a bit depending on the purpose of making the distinction, but essentially it refers to those parts of science whose emphasis lies in accurate repeatable descriptions such as:

X causes A in circumstances B.

Niiniluoto suggests that the distinction between what he calls descriptive sciences and design sciences is fundamental. "Descriptive sciences primarily aim to describe, explain and understand the reality surrounding us. Design sciences, on the other hand, aim at knowledge that is useful for the activity of design, i.e. aim to enhance human art and skill."

Normative (or prescriptive)

Normative claims prescribe (say what should be done) or evaluate (say what's good/bad).

Examples in ethics:

• It's wrong to tell a lie.
• Is it wrong to tell a lie?
• What should be our moral obligations?
• What is Right and what is Wrong?
• Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. (Golden Rule)

Normative ethics involves creating or evaluating moral standards. Thus, it is an attempt to figure out what people should do or whether their current moral behavior is reasonable. Traditionally, most of the field of moral philosophy has involved normative ethics. This process involves examining the moral standards people currently use in order to determine if they are justifiable, as well as attempting to construct new moral standards which might be better. In either case, the philosopher is critically investigating the nature and grounds of moral standards, moral principles, moral rules, and moral conduct.

Normative science is a form of inquiry, typically involving a community of inquiry and its accumulated body of provisional knowledge, that seeks to discover good ways of achieving recognized aims, ends, goals, objectives, or purposes. The three normative sciences, according to traditional conceptions in philosophy, are aesthetics, ethics, and logic.

In Education:

A theory of education can be "normative (or prescriptive) as in philosophy, or descriptive as in science."[1] In the first case, a theory means a postulation about what ought to be. It provides the "goals, norms, and standards for conducting the process of education."[2] In the second case, it means "an hypothesis or set of hypotheses that have been verified by observation and experiment."[1] Whereas a normative educational theory provided by a philosopher might offer goals of education, descriptive "theory provides concrete data that will help realize more effectively the goals suggested by the philosopher."[1] A descriptive theory of education can be thought of as a conceptual scheme that ties together various "otherwise discrete particulars. . .For example, a cultural theory of education shows how the concept of culture can be used to organize and unify the variety of facts about how and what people learn."[3] Likewise, for example, there is the behaviorist theory of education that comes from educational psychology and the functionalist theory of education that comes from sociology of education.[4]

Analytical

Analytical (metaethics) ethics: involves reasoning about the presuppositions behind the moral systems developed under the category of normative ethics. Whenever a moral system is created, it is based upon certain premises about reality, human nature, values, etc. Metaethics is all about questioning the validity of those premises and arguing that perhaps we don't really know what we are talking about after all.

Example questions:

• How are moral judgments even possible? Why be moral at all?
• Do moral values exist objectively or only subjectively?

Situated Action (not that I like it!)

From 'Studying Context: A Comparison of Activity Theory, Situated Action Models, and Distributed Cognition'. Bonnie A. Nardi. 11995 (pp.2)

SITUATED ACTION MODELS

The two main references for situated action which are used in Nardi's explanation are Suchman (1987), and Lave (1988)

Situated action models emphasize the emergent, contingent nature of human activity, the way activity grows directly out of the particularities of a given situation. The focus of study is situated activity or practice, as opposed to the study of the formal or cognitive properties of artifacts, or structured social relations, or enduring cultural knowledge and values. Situated action analysts do not deny that artifacts or social relations or knowledge or values are important, but they argue that the true locus of inquiry should be the ``everyday activity of persons acting in [a] setting''. That this inquiry is meant to take place at a very fine-grained level of minutely observed activities, inextricably embedded in a particular situation, is reflected in Suchman's (1987) statement that ``the organization of situated action is an emergent property of moment-by-moment interactions between actors, and between actors and the environments of their action.''

Lave (1988) identifies the basic unit of analysis for situated action as ``the activity of persons acting in setting.'' The unit of analysis is thus not the individual, not the environment, but a relation between the two. A setting is defined as ``a relation between acting persons and the arenas in relation with which they act.'' An arena is a stable institutional framework. For example, a supermarket is an arena within which activity takes place. For the individual who shops in the supermarket, the supermarket is experienced as a setting because it is a ``personally ordered, edited version'' of the institution of the supermarket. In other words, each shopper shops only for certain items in certain aisles, depending on her needs and habits. She has thus ``edited'' the institution to match her personal preferences .

An important aspect of the ``activity of persons-acting in setting'' as a unit of analysis is that it forces the analyst to pay attention to the flux of ongoing activity, to focus on the unfolding of real activity in a real setting. Situated action emphasizes responsiveness to the environment and the improvisatory nature of human activity. In emphasizing improvisation and response to contingency, situated action deemphasizes study of more durable, stable phenomena that persist across situations. It is a highly particularistic accounting of a single episode that highlights an individual's creative response to a unique situation.

A central tenet of the situated action approach is that the structuring of activity is not something that precedes it but can only grow directly out of the immediacy of the situation. The insistence on the exigencies (necessity) of particular situations and the emergent, contingent character of action is a reaction to years of influential work in artificial intelligence and cognitive science in which ``problem solving'' was seen as a ``series of objective, rational pre-specified means to ends'' and work that overemphasized the importance of plans in shaping behavior. Such work failed to recognize the opportunistic, flexible way that people engage in real activity. It failed to treat the environment as an important shaper of activity, concentrating almost exclusively on representations in the head—usually rigid, planful ones—as the object of study.

Models, Theories, and Frameworks

Summarized from 'Interaction Design: beyond Human-Computer Interaction' by Sharp, Helen and Rogers, Yvonne and Preece, Jenny. Wiley, 2007.

Theories, models, and frameworks are sources of inspiration and knowledge that are used to inform design and guide research.

Theories are well-substantiated explanations of some aspect of a phenomenon. Theories provide a means of analysis and prediction (in HCI analysis and prediction of user performance when interacting with the interface).

For example, the theory of information processing explains how the mind, or some aspects of it, is assumed to work.

Models are simplifications of some aspect of human-computer interaction intended to make it easier for designers to predict and evaluate alternative designs. Models are typically abstracted from a theory coming from a contributing discipline (e.g. psychology).

Frameworks are sets of interrelated concepts and/or sets of specific questions that are intended to inform a particular domain area (e.g. collaborative learning). Frameworks help designers constrain and scope the user experience.

In contrast to a model - which is a simplification of a phenomenon- a framework offers advice to designers as to what to design and look for. A framework can be in the form of steps, questions, concepts, or principals.

Frameworks are usually developed from experience of actual design practice and the findings arising from user studies.

Theories, models, and frameworks overlap in their way of conceptualizing the problem and the design space, but vary in their level of rigor, abstraction, and purpose.

Theories tend to be comprehensive explaining human-computer interaction.

Models tend to simplify some aspects of human-computer interaction providing a basis for designing and evaluating systems.

Frameworks tend to be prescriptive providing designers with concepts and principals to consider when designing for user experience.

Where the action is

Where the Action Is

The Foundations of Embodied Interaction

Paul Dourish

This is a very good book, but one that is not very easy to assimilate from first reading. This is a condensed version prepared mainly by 're-typing' with some rephrasing or summarizing here and there.

Where the Action Is

The Foundations of Embodied Interaction

Embodied Interaction is interaction with computer systems that occupy our world, a world of physical and social reality, and that exploit this fact in how they interact with us. it denotes a form of participative status. Embodied phenomena are ones we encounter directly rather than abstractly

It is also defined as the creation, manipulation, and sharing of meaning through engaged interaction with artifacts.

[The opposite of embodied interaction is that of cognitivism in which the human brain is modeled by information theory and it acts on an abstract representation of the world, and in which a disembodied brain could think about the world just as we do.]

In contrast, and in the embodied interaction view, such a disembodied brain could not experience the world in the same ways that we do, because our experience of the world is intimately tied to the ways in which we act in it. Physically our experiences cannot be separated from the reality of our bodily presence in the world; and socially, too, the same relationship holds because our nature as social beings is based on the ways in which we act and interact, in real time, all the time.

From Tangible and Social Computing to Embodied Interaction

The book argues that social and tangible interaction are based on the same underlying principles, despite their differences in the approaches they adopt and the ways in which they apply to design of interactive systems. The common elements are:

- They both exploit our familiarity and facility with the everyday world—whether it is a world of social interaction of physical artifacts.

- Both draw on the fact that the ways in which we experience the world are through directly interacting with it, and that we act in the world by exploring the opportunities for action that it provides to us—whether through its physical configuration or through socially constructed meaning.

In other words, they share an understanding that you cannot separate the individual from the world in which the individual lives and acts.

This is in contrast to the cognitivism approach which makes a strong separation between on the one hand the mind as a the seat of consciousness and rational decision making, with an abstract model of the world that can be operated upon to form plans of action; and, on the other hand, the objective, external world as a largely stable collection of objects and events to be observed and manipulated according to the internal mental state of the individual. From this perspective a disembodied brain could think about the world just as we do.

Embodiment is relevant to interactions with computers in three relevant ways:

1- designers of interactive systems have increasingly come to understand that interaction is intimately connected with the settings in which it occurs.

2- The focus on settings reflects a more general turn to consider work activities and artifacts in concrete terms rather than abstract ones. (instead of abstract accounts of mythical users, HCI increasingly employs field studies).

3- The artifacts of daily interaction can play many different roles through their direct embodiment in the world we occupy.

The book has four hypothesis:

1- Tangible and social computing have a common basis

2- Embodiment is the core element they have in common

3- Embodiment is not a new idea, but has been a primary topic for phenomenology

4- Phenomenology and related investigations of embodiment can provide material for developing a foundation for embodied interaction.

Definitions:

Phenomenology: a branch of philosophy principally concerned with human experience. It is primarily concerned with how we

- Perceive

- Experience, and

- Act

In the world around us.

This in contrast to having build an abstract model of the world in which we understand and see, but rather we see then understand.

Ontology: The study of nature of being and categories of existence

Epistemology: the study of knowledge

Tangible computing

Common features of tangible computing

1- No single point of control or interaction

2- Parallel interaction

3- The physical properties of the interface suggests its use

There is still no theory of tangible interaction. For example

- Why does tangible interaction work?

- Which features are important, which are merely convenient, and which are simply wrong?

- How does tangible computing mediate between the environment and the activity that unfolds it?

In this book, the essence of tangible computing lies in the way in which it allows computation to be manifest for us in the everyday world; a world that is available for our interpretation, and one which is meaningful for us in the ways in which we can understand and act in it.

Social computing

Broadly speaking, social computing refers to the application of sociological understanding to the design of interactive systems.

Sociology is concerned with the structure and function of society, and interactive systems are tools that people use. We are interested in the relationship between sociological and technical issues where sociologists and technologists work together in the design process.

The different theoretical and sociological approaches discussed in this book share 3 common c/cs:

1- the are concerned with the details of the organization of social conduct rather than broad social trends.

2- they are primarily oriented toward real activities and experiences rather than abstractions or models,

3- they all adopt an anthropological perspective on collecting, interpreting, and using field materials.

Ethnography emphasizes on detailed understanding of culture, through intensive, long-term involvement. It involves participant-observation in which the ethnographer immerses himself in the culture and explore the member’s own view of his life and culture. Describe not just what the member of culture do, but what they experience in doing it.

Ethnomethodology is the study of common sense methods by which people manage and organize their everyday behavior. The object of its investigation is common sense (what everyone knows that everyone knows).

Use ethnographic methods to collect information, but use ethnomethodology to inform the analysis.

Technomethodology is a term coined by the author of the book in (Dourish and Button 1998). It is used to describe a deeper relationship between technological design and ethnomethodology. The deeper relationship satisfies two criteria:

1- it attempts to draw not simply on a set of observations of a specific working setting, but rather on ethnomethodology’s fundamental insights about the organization of action as being a moment-to-moment, naturally occurring, improvisational response to practical problems

2- it attempts to relate these understandings not simply to design of a specific interactive system aimed at a specific setting, but rather, at the basic, fundamental principal around which software systems are developed – ideas such as abstraction, function, substitution, identity, and representation.

In their study they try to find overlap in such conceptions as accountability and abstraction.

Accountability: in ethnomethodology, accountability means “observable and reportable”. the observable and reportable nature of conduct is available only to members of a community as they are the ones who make sense of what is happening so that they can observe it and report it correctly. The methods of understanding and making sense of action and the methods for engaging in it are the same methods (the activities whereby members produce action.. are identical with their procedures for making those actions ‘accountable’). We can speak of an accountability of a social action. that is a social action is accountable if it is observable and reportable.

The analytical concept of accountability emphasizes that the organization of action, as it arises in situ, provides others with the means to understand what it is and how to respond in a mutually constructed sequence of action. It turns our attention away from simple perceived result or outcome of an action, to include how that result is achieved. We pay attention not just to destination, but also to the route taken to get there. Ethnomethodological investigations, such as those into the organization of conversation, show how this is critically important in providing a basis for rational mutual action.

Abstration: The very essence of software system design is the manipulation, combination, and creation of abstractions (eg. menus, buttons, scrollbars). Abstraction hides implementation (eg. the gas paddle is an abstraction for the engine which is the implementation).

Abstraction and accountability: In everyday interaction, ethnomethodology argues that accountability is the key feature that enables users to be able to decide what to do in order to get things done. The way the activities are organized makes their nature available to others; they can be seen and inspected, observed and reported. But this feature – the way that actions are organized – is exactly what is hidden by software abstractions. Not by accident, but by design. In the “information hiding” approach, the information that is hidden is information about how the system is doing what it does, how the perceived action is organized.

In system design, then, accountability means that the interface should be designed so as to preserve as a part of its actions, an “account” of what is happening. In short, it is a good idea to built systems that tell the user what they are doing. So the account should not simply be an abstract description of the system’s behavior, but rather an explication of how the system’s current configuration is a response to the sequence of actions that has led up to this moment, and a step on the path toward completing the larger action in which it is engaged.

The important issue in the book is not the account, but accountability – that is, how the account is related to the behavior it describes. This requires a technical approach that provides three primary features:

1- find a way to ensure that the account that is offered of the system’s behavior—a representation of that behavior—is strongly connected to the behavior that it describes. (the programmer should be in control over the ways that these two agree or differ)

2- find a way to allow this representation to be tied to the action in such a way that the account emerges along with the action rather than separately from it.

3- ensure that the account that is offered is an account of the current specific behavior of the system, in its current configuration and tackling exactly this piece of work rather than a generic account that says little more than “Oh, this is how the system generally behaves”.

One way to do this is through a reflective technique where the software design closely reflects the domain that the program is dealing with (cells in a spread sheet, or paragraphs in a document). The representation of the program not only describes the program, but also gives rise to it; the program is in effect, no more than the “performance” of the representation.

Space and Place

Space is largely concerned with physical properties (or metaphorical physical properties). It concerns how people and artifacts are configured in a setting; how far apart they are, how they interfer with lines of sight, and so on. By configuring the space in different ways, different kinds of behaviors can be supported.

Place refers to the way that social understangins convey an appropriate behavioral framing for an environment. that is why we say “out of place” and not “out of space”. So people might behave differently in two exactly different space arrangements when they are in two different places (table and chair in a meeting room, or a dining room).

So the different between space and place is that between the physical and the social.

Therefore, there are three design implications for taking a view that is centered on place rather than space:

1- this turns our attention away from the structure of the space and toward the activities that take place there.

2- The place reflects the emergence of practice. Users (not designers) need to be able to appropriate the space to the purpose at hand. This means that true places emerge only when really occupied day-to-day, not in demonstrations or experiments that last a few hours, and that place can’t be designed, only designed for.

3- The idea of place is relative to a particular community of practice.

The Locales Framework

The Locale framework has five primary components called:

1- Foundations: the social world being addressed and the sites and means that make up the local. (membership, duration, structure, roles, culture, focus and tasks)

2- Civic structure: examines how the locale relates to the others.

3- Individual views: addresses the individuals with their own perspectives, concerns, roles and forms of participation

4- Interaction trajectory” refers to the emergence of a particular course of action as it may be evolved through time and involving multiple actors. This ties together the way in which actions are situated within particular histories and the notion of the collective action of social worlds. this applies to social worlds and individuals. This helps in understanding how social worlds develop, how people enter and elave, and how the activities in which they engage contribute to the various courses of action in which the social world is engaged.

5- Mutuality. this explores the way in which these elements are made manifest or present in a space as a consequence of the manifestation of entities in a shared environment, made mutually accessible to the other participants.

Presence and awareness (taken from Fitzpatrick 1998)

For interaction to happen in a locale, there are basic requirements for presense and awareness.

1- the potential interactants need some form of representation or way of making themselves (or being made) present in the locale

2- the potential interactants need some way of being aware of the other’s presence.

Both presence and awareness possibilities for the interactants are facilitated by marious mechanisms that are part of the locale domain(s)..For the purpose at hand, the interactants will make selective choices, consciously or unconsciously to do so. Hence mutuality is the interplay of presense and awareness for interaction purposes, mediated by capability and choice.

Both the Locale Framework and Technomethodology try to draw our relationships between aspects of technological design and aspects of sociological analysis.

A philosophical discussion on the mind and meaning

Most philosophers since Descartes had taken the position that the mind is the seat of reason and meaning. The mind observes the world, gives it meaning by relating it to abstract understandings of an idealized reality and, on the basis of that meaning, formulates a plan of action. Heidegger turned that around. From his perspective, the meaningfulness of everyday experience lies not in the head, but in the world. It is a consequence of our mode of being, of the way in which we exist in the world. Where traditional philosophical approaches argued that we proceed from perception to meaning to action, Heidegger stressed the way that we ordinarily act in a world that is already organized in terms of meaning. the world has meaning for us in the ways in which we encounter it and the ways that it makes itself available to us.

Ready-to-hand & ready-at-hand

Based on Heidegger, these are two ways that we encounter the world and act through it and it had its consequences on HCI

When the tool is ready-at-hand it disappears from the view (withdraws) as an independent entity although we are acting through it (like a hammer in a normal case) or a mouse when operating normally.

When a breakdown appears, the tool becomes present-at-hand, like when the mouse ball gets dirty, or the mouse goes outside its mouse pad. that is it draws attention to itself (becomes present)

Being in the Physical World

Affordances: an affordance is a property of the environment that affords action to appropriately equipped organisms. For example, the glass of my window affords looking to me, because I have eyes that operate in that part of the electromagnetic spectrum to which the glass is transparent. My office chair affords sitting to me, because its seat matches the length of my legs. My office chair does not afford sitting to a horse or a rabbit; they are not appropriately equipped.

In other words, an affordance is a three-way relationship between the environment, the organism, and the activity

Environment(chair) ßà organism(human) ßàactivity(sitting) (this points back to env.)

Embodied skills depend on a tight coupling between perception and action. Polanyi distinguishes between what he calls proximal and distal phenomina. Loosely, proximal means “close by” or “at hand” while distal means “at a distance”. he argues that, in cases of tacit skills, our focus in on the distal phenomena, while the proximal phenomena are thouse through which the distal is achieved. Like the example of using a stick to feel the way in the dark. the feeling of the ground (distal) is through the sensory impressions we are getting through the stick (proximal) (similar to activity theory and present at hand and ready to hand)

Being in the social world

Meaning

The three aspects of meaning: Ontology, intersubjectivity, and intentionality.

Ontology:

Ontology is the branch of metaphysics concerned with the existence of objects and entities. It deals with how the world can be separated into a collection of entities whose meanings can be established, separated, and identified, and how these entities can be related to each other; how, for example, my world can be populated with entities such as computers, deadlines, chairs, and political convictions that play no part in the world of grasshoppers. In particular. in attempting to talk about entities, ontology addresses the question of how we can individuate the world, or distinguish between one entity or another; how we can understand the relationships between different entities or classes of entity; and so forth.

Ontology deals with the furniture of the world that differs depending on whose world it is. in the industrialized cultures, we live in a world furnished with political scandals, internet technologies, stock crashes, carpool lanes, and satellite broadcasts; but none of these featured in the worldview of original Australians.

Ontology is an aspect of meaning in the sense that it provides the structure from which meaning can be constructed.

Ontological problems manifest themselves quite quickly in software design. Designing a software system involves making decisions about entities, about their types and relationships, and determining how these will “line up” with elements of the real world to which they refer. When designers of a hotel registration system debate whether a reservation should be recorded as a feature of a room or of a day or of a person, they are designing the “ontology” of their system.

Ontology is not shared and is not static.

Intersubjectivity

Intersubjectivity is about how the meaning (as discussed by ontology) can be shared. The problem of Intersubjectivity is how two people can come to share an understanding about the world and about each other despite the fact that they have no immediate access to each other’s mental states.

The problem of establishing intersubjective understanding in the design of interactive technologies surfaces in two ways:

1- The first, related to the questions of ontology, concerns communication between a designer and a user, and how it is conveyed through an interactive system. The designer must somehow communicate to a user a set of constraints and expectations about how the design should be used. the system is the medium through with the designer and the user communicate. The successful achievement of this communication depends on those relevant aspects of the designer’s model being made available to the users in the course of their activity.

2- The second occasion of Intersubjectivity in interactive system is communication between users, through the system. (not referring to email and such). It refers to the way that people develop and communicate shared ways of using software systems and ways of doing their work with software systems. Systems come to be appropriated by their users and are put to work within particular patterns of practice.

Intentionality

It is the term philosophers use to refer to the directedness of meaning. Intentionality proposes meaning as a relationship between some entity (perhaps a thought or utterance) and some other entity (its meaning). For instance, when I think of my editor , there is an intentional relation between my thought and a bearded man called Bob. When we say that the word tree means an example of that class of plants with woody bark, say, then we imply that there is an intentional reference, directed from the word to the concept. Thoughts, memories, and imaginings, then, are intentional acts.

It concerns the relationship between what is done and what is meant

Coupling: is the way we can build up and break down relationships between entities, putting them together or taking them apart for the purpose of incorporating them into our actions. When I lift a rock using a lever, the rock and the lever are coupled.

When a hammer is ready-at-hand (invisible) it is coupled with my arm.

Coupling allows us to revise and reconfigure our relationship toward the world in use, turning it into a set of tools to accomplish different tasks.

[We must have options in choosing which tools or abstractions we want to use (couple with) in order to perform the activity and have the options to decouple and choose other coupling]

We work with abstractions, but rely on implementations to make them real. But by focusing on the abstractions, we often ignore the practical consequences of implementation.

while intentionality concerns the relationship between what is done and what is meant, coupling is concerned with how that relationship is maintained.

Summary: Meaning and coupling

Meaning involves a set of related but distinct phenomena, including intentionality, ontology, and Intersubjectivity. Each of these plays a role in understanding embodied interaction. Intentionality concerns the directedness of our actions, and the effects that our actions are designed to cause. Ontology concerns the ways in which, through our interaction with technological systems, we come to understand the computational world in which and through which we operate. Intersubjectivity reflects the fact that this world is one we share with other individuals; the understandings we develop of technological artifacts and social actions are ones that emerge in concert with other people. Coupling shows not just how we can understand and interpret interactive systems, but how we can operate through them. Effective action involves being able to reorient ourselves towards the technology, turning it from an object of enquiry and examination, into a tool that can be used. Technological artifacts have to be incorportated as part of a pattern of action.

The primary characteristic of technologies supporting embodied interaction is that they variously make manifest how they are coupled to the world, and so afford us the opportunity to orient to them in a variety of ways. The embodied interaction perspective begins to illumnate not just how we act on technology, but how we act through it.

Theory and Design

Theory and design are fundamentally different sorts of activities, carried out by different people with different training and presented to different audiences. the goals and criteria for theoretical examinations are quite different from those for design excercises.

Theory grounds design by providing a framework within which hypotheses can be constructed and tested, options explored and compared, and results analyzed and evaluated, and verified. From this perspective, design is simply speculative without an understanding of how and why it works; theory makes design real, because it places design in context that explains it. Whichever position we hold, though, a working relationship between theoretical understanding and design practice is crucial.

At the heart of tangible computing is the relationship between activities and the space in which they are carried out. Tangible computing explores this in three related ways: through the configurability of space, through the relationship of body to task, and through physical constraints. By the configurability of space , it is meant the ways in which tangible computing allows users to arrange the environment to meet their own particular needs. Tangible design often associate particular sors of functionality with different physical objects, whose distribution in a workspace is then under the control of the user. Because the body location and configuration in space is also adjustable, the idea of reconfigurable space leads naturally to the second issue, that of the relationship of the body to the task. Carrying out different aspects of an activity, we may need to be closer, farther away, or in different orientations to the objects of work at hand. We move around the action as the task requires. So the distribution in space introduced by tangible computing also supports a negotiable relationship between body configuration and the computation being employed in a task. Configuring the space and configuring the body are carried out relative to each other.

Exploiting physical constraints is an important part of tangible-computing design. For example two objects cannot be at the same place at the same time, so a mutual exclusion constraint can be embodied directly in the mapping of data objects onto physical ones.

In social computing, the design of interactive systems should be changed in two ways. The first is to support the improvised sequential organization of action by giving users more direct control over how activity is managed, perhaps by organizing the interaction as informal assemblage of steps rather than a rote procedure driven by the system. The second response is to help support the process of improvised, situated action by making the immediate circumstances of the work more visible. The insight here that the setting in which the work emerges includes the current state of the system; the system should make information available to the user to guide their activity moment by moment.

Six design principals:

1- Computation is a medium

[Computation (not computers) is a medium through which we accomplish our goals. The focus is on computation, because the computer itself should be hidden and we should just be aware that some computation is being done to help us achieve our goal.]

The medium is not simply the representation that is conveyed, but how that representation

2- meaning arises on multiple levels

Objects carry meaning on multiple levels: as entities in their own right, as signifiers of social meaning, as elements in systems of practice, and so on. The consequence of this in supporting embodied interaction system is in that the design should be oriented toward multiplicity of meaning that may be conveyed through them. The designer, therefore, has a critical role to play in making systems open to multiple forms of use. Something can simultaneously be representation, object, and action, carrying different meanings, values, and consequences.

3- users, not designers, create and communicate meaning, and

- users, not designers, manage coupling,

4- embodied technologies participate in the world they represent

5- embodied interaction turns action into meaning.