Documentation Analysis and Social Tagging

Dorothy Winsor: “Genre and Activity Systems: The Role of Documentation…”

By examining the genre of written documentation in the context of engineering firm activity systems, Winsor explores issues of documentary reality and related issues of power and agency. The four men she followed “were in positions where they had to represent multiple and sometimes conflicting interest to one another and keep those interests connected into a smoothly functioning system” (211). As a result, the documentation they maintained served two primary purposes: protecting themselves and prompting others to take action.

As entry-level employees, the study participants occasionally documented their actions as a way to “shape others’ perceptions of their own actions” (210). According to Winsor, they “used documentation to exercise agency in shaping the activity systems in which they participated” (208), or to show that they are responsible contributors to the network of which they are a part.

The employees were more likely to use documentation to “shape the actions of others” (210), which sounds rather sinister at first. However, Winsor explains that because these are entry-level employees, they are low on the totem pole. Collaborative documentation serves to regulate “future actions by mutual consent, giving that mutual consent a more durable and, hence, stronger form” (212), while memos describing discussions and proposed actions help to shift some of the burden of responsibility, again by providing a durable record of individual responsibilities. Memos, too, could be copied to supervisors as a means of strengthening their messages.

The documentation used by an activity system tends to conform to certain conventions which are determined either explicitly or tacitly by the system: politeness, the elimination of specific details that are not considered relevant or appropriate to the end result, a predefined format (or even a form to be filled in), and more. These attendant conventions ensure that a particular type of reality/documentation is produced. This action “carries with it the potential for both modifying and maintaining activity systems” (204).

Since we now have started interviewing and collecting texts for our activity system project, I find it interesting to note how many documents are shared and the particular purposes they serve. Much of our activity system is textual, consisting of manuscripts, galleys, readers’ reports, emails and spreadsheets. However, documentation of the type described by Winsor is minimal and introspective; participants in the system seem to document for themselves rather than for others.

Stefanie Panke and Birgit Gaiser: “With My Head Up in the Clouds”

My impressions of this article are fragmented.

1. Panke and Gaiser cite a study by K. Lee that found that “social presence enhances cooperative user behavior in a social tagging environment” (328). Several archives have experimented with social tagging as a way to collect metadata, especially on materials about which little is known and I recently read an article (perhaps if I’d tagged it in Delicious, I could cite it properly now) postulating that the reason tagging initiatives at individual institutions often don’t result in usable metadata is because the user range for most libraries and archives simply isn’t wide enough. The Lee study would seem to reinforce that idea.
2. “…Compartmentalized thinking in knowledge organization is neither necessary nor desirable” (321). Paper data demands compartmentalization, though indexes and cross-references attempt to drill tiny holes through some of the barriers. The explosion of digital data offers a lot of opportunity for access. I had never thought of tags as dynamic links, but the concept makes a lot of sense. Whether the reality makes sense is another thing, but I suspect we’re getting there.
3. Social taggers “developed personal rules for assigning tags to keep track of their vocabulary” (340). It’s possible that every time I see the word “rules” from here on out, I will think of Engestrom’s activity theory triangle.
4. Tags are not updated and tagged content is frequently not accessed after it is tagged indicating that tagging serves a particular purpose at a particular time (345). Every so often, I click on a previously forgotten tag in my Delicious list to find out what the heck I thought was so interesting. I am frequently disappointed. This makes me wonder if the ease of tagging is actually one of its flaws.