Text Document
Building Bridges: Customisation and Mutual Intelligibility in Shared Category Management
Fulltext URI
Document type
Additional Information
Date
1999
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
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.