LIS 4701 Information Representation

Week 10, March 16 and 18, Tying representation to the user

Today's three tasks:

Pause and think about the title of this unit: Schemas, genres, and mental models
Discuss briefly the McArthur reading, highlighting key points
Handing the in-class work required for A3, which is due next Thursday

Schemas, genres, and mental models

Schema: mental codification of experience that includes a particular organized way of perceiving cognitively and responding to a complex situation or set of stimuli

Genre: characterized by a particular style, form, or content (may be a stimulus that activates a schema)

Mental model:  http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/large/003253.php
(McDaniel piece in Boxes and Arrows)

McArthur chapters

p. 4 "'real' tools have served as models for 'tools of the mind'"

moving from the "physical world" to "inside our heads"

Four shifts in communication ("system-building in the mind"): speech/gesture; writing; print; electronic computation (and the attendant discussion in McArthur takes you to the end of Chapter 1 on page 8)

And Chapter 2 starts us off with Popper's three worlds:

1: material things
2: "inner landscape": what has developed in the mind
3: interaction of 1 and 2 leads to independent, public, store of encoded knowledge

Structure: "imposting shape ... banishes randomness" (p. 11)
Loose structures are good but subject to entropy; tight structures are good but subject to fossilization.

p. 13: order: scenes in a drama, sequences of films ... order in atoms, molecules, crystals ...
so is a sense of order part of our mental model?

The signifier is not the signified (p. 14): that is, words relate to things but are not the things. Relevant for us here in addition because: just because you activate a particular schema doesn't mean you've hit on the exact same stimuli


In-class work for A3:

Create the interaction and the mental model that you will use for this assignment. Start to flesh them out, now. For the interaction, provide specific details about who, what, when, where, why, & how. For the mental model, start to build the model according to the McDaniel reading.

You may flesh these out as much as you'd like (in fact you'd better flesh them out quite a bit!) in your assignment. Take up as much space as you like.