Administrivia:

GICCA 2 is next Tuesday, April 13. You should count on, just like in the first GICCA, questions that are heavily readings-based as well as some based on the assignment you have done and on our in-class exercises. Groups for this GICCA are assigned by me, and I'll let you know on Thursday what they are.On Thursday, the lab will be a Unit 2 review with your groups.

Readings for this week:

Brown, Arnold. (2002). A tangled web. Across the Board, 39(2), pp. 69-70. (available online through the WilsonSelectPlus database on OCLC FirstSearch)

Schuyler, Michael. (2003). “You can’t disintermediate the great intermediaries! Computers in Libraries, 23(4), pp. 42-43. (available online through the Library Literature database in OCLC FirstSearch)

Things to do this week (which means today, of course):

--what do we mean by intermediaries and intermediation?

• the age of bypassing the middle-man
• what's an intermediary in terms of information representation?
• in thinking about intermediation when we think about representing information, there are many points along the process where intermediation happens.

remember, our mental model approach means that users have mental models, and those of us designing information representation systems (deciding what goes in the surrogates, how we allow aggregation, what vocabularies to use, how to create visual representations, etc.) have mental models.

Last assignment, we worked on mental model disconnects:

• the wrong mental model may mean the interaction isn't completed
• or a user may persist with the wrong mental model, having it work fine until an unusual situation causes it to "go" wrong
• or the wrong mental model may simply mean that things go kind of badly, but kind of okay

this has the potential to be really really bad: one extra place for things to go wrong!

but it has the potential to be really really good:

• someone to translate between mental models
• adjusting for the schemas, genres, and vocabularies that are understood by each party

--main points from the two readings

Brown:

intermediaries:

• clarify complexity
• filter overload
• streamline machine-able to people-able

    re-intermediation often happens at a different point in the cycle (e.g. Motley Fool)

which means that certain tasks are left "disintermediated" -- it's best not to focus only on the interesting points of re-intermediation, but also on the     points of persistent disintermediation

Schuyler:

give people the ability to do more for themselves -- and instead of complaining that you're offloading work onto them, they'll grasp it happily. Go figure. but this is an important consideration in thinking about intermediation: people are happy to do your job for you, and they always think they do it just as well as you do.

List at least three examples of information interactions that you perceive to be "disintermediated"

Addendum:
[http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc/tectran/116.htm (who is this by? who is this for? more to the point, it's about technology ... but let's think about these  same issues related instead to information representation systems)]