BE A SUBJECT IN A DIARY
STUDY
You are going to log
your information activity for one day.
See the descriptions of
the 2 actual studies on the next page. Decide
whether you want to log your activity using (1) a paper log (here's the form) or (2) a camera (the latter works
best if you have a cameraphone or a small digital
camera).
For one day, follow the
instructions for the study you choose to participate in. Keep your log and/or pictures; we'll use them in the next part of this assignment. Fifteen subjects were
asked to log their daily information
capture whenever during the course
of each day they felt the need to "capture" some information either
at work or at home ….Further, we asked them to
estimate the duration of each activity
and to note this down on their log forms.
At the end of each day,
an interviewer used a structured form
in order to expand on the description of each activity and to
note down more details such as what types of documents were used, whether the
activity was collaborative, where the activity occurred, and what additional
tools were used. Adapted fro Adler et al. 1998 DIARY STUDY 2 This study used a diary methodology which was a modification
of previous methods we have used. Instead of asking subjects to keep written
notes on their activities, we asked them to take
photographs of the events we were interested in. We equipped subjects with
digital cameras to use over the course of 7 consecutive days (covering on average
5 working days and 2 days at home). Subjects in both groups were asked to use the camera whenever during the course
of each day they felt the need to "capture" some information either
at work or at home. It was emphasized that they should use the camera as a diary
tool rather than as a conventional camera. They were told to take a picture
whenever they actually captured some information in the course of their
day, or whenever they would have liked to have captured information but
did not have the means. Subjects were told we were interested in opportunities
to capture any kind of information they came across - be it spoken or ambient
sound, document-based information (paper
or electronic), moving image, or scenes. The pictures themselves were used later as illustrations
and as memory joggers in semi-structured interviews
intended to unpack the context surrounding each capture event. Subjects were interviewed three times over
the week, and asked in detail about each photograph they had taken. For each
photograph, they were asked a number of different questions including: • What did they and how
ideally would they have captured the information? • How did they or how would they have used the information
they captured? • Did they share or did they want to share the
captured information? • Did they or would they have wanted to keep the
captured information? Adapted from (Brown, Sellen, &
O'Hara, 2000) Brown, B. A. T., Sellen, A. J., & O'Hara, K. p. (2000). A diary study
of information capture in working life. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing
systems (pp. 438-445). New York: ACM Press.http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/332040.332472
DIARY STUDY 1