Image, above: Radiation Infographic by byDavvi, CC-licensed

Marshall McLuhan was right: the medium is, in part, the message. That, says Jan Swafford, is why ebooks will never completely replace print:

“E-books won’t destroy paper and ink. The Internet and e-books may set back print media for a while, and they may claim a larger audience in the end. But a lot of people who care about reading will want the feel, the smell, the warmth, the deeper intellectual, emotional, and spiritual involvement of print.”

Some messages, of course, don’t require an emotional investment on the part of the reader.

Health of England - The New York Times iPad infographic -- click to see more images on Flickr

Known for the quality of its ‘infographics’ — visual representations of information that explain events or concepts — the New York Times is experimenting with new ways to present data. An ‘interactive infographic’ accompanied a recent NYT article on the north-south gap in England’s health care:

“The different ‘Health Wheels’ distil 32 different health indicators across 9 geographical regions. The wheels act as visual barometers for the health of each region, in order to provide users with an intuitive way of scanning through all the indicators. A map of England communicates the national perspective in response to the wheel, with a ‘traffic light’ colour code identifying which regions score ‘better than’, ‘worse than’ or ‘average’ compared to the national mean. For the regional view, segments on the wheel are color-coded according to the performance of each indicator.”

You don’t need an iPad to see it — the NYT published a video and Flickr set of photos to show the infographic’s development process and the final product.

Other online publications have also experimented with animated infographics to explain complex concepts.

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The Little, Brown paperback edition of Iain M Banks’s latest novel, Transition, comes with a unique barcode. Scan the barcode with your iPhone and it will download companion features for the novel — unseen chapters, author’s notes and commentary, and an annotated list of characters.

Rival publisher Canongate:

“… is no slouch in the digital department itself, … launching a (paid-for) enhanced iPhone app for Nick Cave’s novel The Death of Bunny Munro … complete with videos of Cave and an audio version synched to the text of the book, scored by Cave himself.”

Smart business.

Infographic showing relative proportions of printed and digital materials lent by US libraries. Data source: ALA. Infographic published in the Wall Street Journal (click image for full article)

Libraries, too, are embracing e-books. Led by the Internet Archive  a group of US lending libraries have set up OpenLibrary.org, a web site for borrowing e-books.

Geoffrey Fowler writes in the Wall Street Journal that the OpenLibrary catalogue includes access to “more than a million scanned public domain books and a catalog of thousands of contemporary e-book titles available at many public libraries.”

The digital collection will include scans of out-of-print books that can still be found on library shelves. Each title can be borrowed by only one person at a time; if the e-book version is checked out, then the corresponding printed edition will not be available for loan.

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“Enterprise software products are complex, powerful tools. Their complexity is one of the reasons businesses sometimes fail to fully realize the expected return on investment from these products.

“For enterprise employees, who must use these enterprise applications, this complexity poses a considerable challenge. When an organization deploys an application, it expects users to learn the new system, integrate it into their existing work processes, and become proficient enough to allow the organization to realize the system’s full benefits. Far too often, however, enterprise employees find these new systems hard to learn, hard to master, and difficult to integrate into existing processes.”

Enterprise systems are rarely engineered for usability, and this is their downfall: by being cumbersome to use and difficult to customise, enterprise systems will cost your business tends of thousands of dollars in wasted staff time — many, many hours of waiting, backtracking, checking, workarounds and delays, not to mention the helpdesk support.

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Fourteen experts, including researchers from the University of Texas, Stanford University, Microsoft and Facebook, predict the directions of social media research in 2009. This field of social analytics is about using data to better understand human behavior and preferences, particularly in online social environments. Such data has enormous potential to generate new business opportunities for onine service providers — and, if you’re an Orwell fan (as am I), to raise the spectre of Big Brother clothed in many uncomfortable shades of grey.

Over the last 12 months Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, the Australian War Memorial, Washington’s Smithsonian Institution and other cultural organisations have been contributing images to the Flickr Commons. The (US) Library of Congress has published a report on its Flickr Commons pilot project, essential reading for academic libraries and other institutions that are considering joining the program.

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Given an essay topic, for example, you start with optimism, confident that some useful information will emerge from your initial search. As you acquire facts about the topic you start to feel swamped, faced with too much information and uncertain about how to make sense of it all. Then you start to analyse, joining pieces of information together and forming your own ideas about the relevance and value of the data, perhaps drawing some conclusions. At this stage, your confidence returns and you feel relief at having found a viable way to tackle the topic.

Kuhlthau illustrates the parallel emotional and cognitive changes that occur during the search process: she calls this the Information Search Process model.

Kuhlthau et al (2008) have reviewed more than 30 studies relating to some aspect of the Information Search Process model, and themselves conducted a new study with 574 school students. They conclude that the Information Search Process is generally sound as a theoretical model and as a practical framework for identifying when to intervene in a student’s learning process.

Other observations from their literature review:

• boys tend to gather and complete, while girls prefer to investigate and formulate
• girls tend to start with optimism and end with doubt; whereas boys tend to be more confident as they complete the research process
• in a digital environment, students tend to assume information will be readily available; the search process tends to end because of deadlines rather than because the original question has been answered satisfactorily, and students’ sense of relief is related more to task completion than to a successful learning outcome
• in educational settings, and particularly when online resources are involved, people tend to skip the early stages of planning their research; however, time spent on refining the topic and developing a research strategy has been shown to produce less frustration and a smoother transition from information-gathering to synthesis and acquisition of knowledge
• “When the model is used as a framework for guiding inquiry, students move away from simply collecting and compiling information to please teachers; rather, they become involved in thinking processes that require extensive exploration of ideas and formulation of thoughts before developing their own deep understanding of their topics and presenting it. By allowing time for reflecting and formulating while they are exploring and collecting information, they avoid missing the critical stages of learning.”
• “If students are aware that increased frustration and anxiety is to be expected mid-way through the construction process they become less discouraged when it happens… Teachers and librarians who guide students through inquiry projects can emphasize this for students and be ready to intervene in helpful ways.”

Except for the last two points, which are quotes from the article, the note above are my interpretation of the article’s findings. What catches your eye in the original paper?

.

Reference

Kuhlthau, CC, HeinstrÖm, J and Todd, RJ (2008). “The ‘information search process’ revisited: is the model still useful?” Information Research, 13(4) paper 355. Available at InformationR.net/ir/13-4/paper355.html

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If you’re interested in the broad field of scholarly information, or if your focus is on information architecture, user experience or customer service, there’s about three hours of entertainment and intellectual challenge in this post (assuming you follow all the links below). Enjoy :-)

During the Information Futures Commission’s consultation process we found anthropologist Michael Wesch’s videos were a terrific way to introduce the topics we were trying to tackle, about how digital technology is changing the scholarly communication process and the way people interact with each other in broader society.

Wesch made a splash in the online world last year when he released Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us. In this short video, Wesch explores the different ways in which people are now interacting with digital information and technologies.

In an interview with John Battelle, Wesch observed that “…if we don’t understand our digital technology and its effects, it can actually make humans and human needs even more invisible than ever before. But the technology also creates a remarkable opportunity for us to make a profound difference in the world.”

To date, the first and revised versions of The Machine is Us/ing Us have been viewed more than 5 million times on YouTube.com.

Wesch followed this success later in 2007 with two further videos. In Information R/evolution, he explores “the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.”

In collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University, Wesch’s third video — A Vision of Students Today — identifies some typical characteristics of today’s university students: “how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.”

Wesch gave an hour-long illustrated talk at the US Library of Congress in June 2008, an anthropological introduction to YouTube. It’s packed with challenging ideas about identity, authenticity, social cohesion — and joy, lots of joy.

(Wesch video found via Laurel Papworth’s silkcharm blog)

Two examples of the joy: Blimvisible’s “Us”…

… and Gary Brolsma’s “New Numa” dance.

There’s yet more Wesch goodness from the University of Manitoba, which has streaming video of his lecture about using social media for teaching. If anybody could make Twitter, Google Apps or Facebook into a useful part of the learning process, you’d think it would be Wesch and his students. In fact, some social media work well and some don’t work at all (in an educational context).

Finally, a slight change of direction. The Medieval Help Desk sketch, from a Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation TV show, reminds us that even the most helpful scholarly technologies can be daunting and confusing when we first encounter them.

OK, that’s yer lot (as Peter Cundall used to say). Marvellous.

[Postal provenance: this is a slightly reworked version of two posts from the Information Futures Commission blog. The original posts were dated January and July 2008.]

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Earlybird registrations are open now, and close next Tuesday 9 September.

Earlybird registrations are A$660, or A$550 if you quote the discount code MR0243. Register online at the conference web site.

The conference will be held in Sydney, on the weekend of 20-21 September.

Who should attend?

• Designers of navigation, organisation, labelling and search systems that help people find and manage information more successfully,
• Librarians, webmasters, and content owners responsible for creating taxonomies and information architectures,
• Application developers who design web and software solutions and select the technologies and staff to support them,
• Project and business managers needing to understand the benefits and challenges of information architectures in electronic information spaces.

[cross-posted at SneedleflipsockTheBlog]

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This September I will be presenting a short (30 minute) session at Oz-IA, a case study based on the Information Futures Commission.

Session title: “Developing a business-led information strategy”

In it, we’ll run briskly through a strategy development process that:

1. takes an holistic approach covering several information ‘domains’
2. is founded on business needs and priorities (enterprise architecture)
3. is informed by external trends, developments (business intelligence)
4. and balances organisational needs with individuals’ requirements and perspectives (user research)

Because the Oz-IA audience is mainly people who work on web sites and applications, I’ll focus on how we used several standard user-experience research methods in the strategy development process.

If you have any questions you’d like me to address in this session, leave a comment below or send me an email.

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For interaction designers and information architects, some of the interest is in the design process itself — see Jesse James Garrett’s comments on the Aurora web page about the weekly ‘open design’ sessions that led to creation of the Aurora concept.

For the rest of us, part of the interest is in how much this project looks like an early prototype of the cool stuff Tom Cruise did with the police computer in Minority Report ;-)

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