4701 Information Representation
Week 3, Day 2, January 22, 2004

Surrogation lab!

Our lab today has two goals: first, you will develop and hand in the in-class portion of Individual Assignment 1.

You’ll hand in:

• the list of search terms you’re going to use for part 1);
• the mechanisms you’ll be using in amazon.com as well as the item you’ll use as a starting point for 2);
• and the resource you’ll be using for part 3) with a description of it and a tentative idea of what you might write about.

(If for some reason you are absent when we do this part, you will still need to hand this in BEFORE you start on the assignment; otherwise, you won’t get a grade for the whole assignment.)

The second goal of today's lab is to work on the concept of surrogation, make sure you've got the idea down. In order to do that, you will work on several things (if you get done early, it means you haven't done a sufficiently thoughtful job to "count," and it won't; but if you work steadily through the class period and don't finish, that's perfectly fine!).

First, I need you to come up with 10 examples of surrogates of information entities. That means something that provides a representation that can stand in place of the information entity.

For each of the 10 examples of surrogates, tell me the following things:

• is it physically smaller, informationally smaller, both, or neither?
• what are the main parts that have been "distilled" from the original to make the surrogate?
• for what purpose was the surrogate made? how well does it serve that purpose? what would you change to make it serve the purpose better?

Now: provide a real-life example of how and why surrogation is used in your area of interest. (e.g., my area of interest is community development among distance learners. A common use of surrogation in this area is the student Personal Profile. Many distance learning programs use personal profiles to help students build a sense of community. Profiles are normally of students -- usually professors are not required to do them, which is interesting! -- and include photos, information about family, geographic location, employment, and interests inside and outside the field being studied. These are used for two primary reasons: first, because students often don't meet one another or their professors at all, and these surrogates provide the only representation available (until they get to know one another's work!); second, because even if students and professors have met, it's useful to have a "refresher" about each person.)


Last, I need you to poke around online and see if you can find any evidence that the way we are using the words "surrogate" and "surrogation" in this class are normal, standard, or common uses of those words? Where did you look and what did you find?