Building bridges: customisation and mutual intelligibility in shared category management

  • Authors:
  • Paul Dourish;John Lamping;Tom Rodden

  • Affiliations:
  • Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA;Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA;Computing Department, Lancaster University, Bailrigg, Lanes LA1 4YR, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • GROUP '99 Proceedings of the international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Research into collaborative document use often concentrates on how people share document content. However, studies of real-world document practices reveal that the structures by which document corpora are organised may also, themselves, be important sites of collaborative activity. Unfortunately, this poses a problem. When category structures are used to understand a set of documents, the manipulation of those structures can interfere with shared understanding and intelligibility of the document space.We show how this problem arises in real-world settings, using a case arising from some recent field work. We outline a solution to the customisation/intelligibility problem, and show how it has been implemented in a system for personal and workgroup document management.