Connecting visual cues to semantic judgments in the context of the office environment

Olha Bondarenko and Ruud Janssen

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2009, vol. 60, issue 5, 933-952

Abstract: In this article, we present the results of a study that systematically explored “externalized knowledge” in the context of office work. The aim of the study was to investigate what knowledge information workers externalize into their physical environment (e.g., when shuffling or relocating paper documents on their desks) and how this knowledge is “encoded” in visual cues. Based on field data, categories of visual cues and semantic judgments were derived, a way to aggregate these categories into clusters was proposed, and a model of the relationships among cues and judgments was developed. We conclude that visual cues of physical documents represent, besides their content, information about the features of content and about different aspects of task context and overview. Three clusters outline the space of visual cues: (a) content that resides in (b) a holder that is (c) located somewhere in space. The three identified clusters of semantic judgments express three aggregation levels of one's work: (a) individual document, (b) the context of this document, and (c) an overview over someone's activities. The nature of the relationships among these clusters is reviewed through three aspects: content‐dependence, flexibility, and effort. We conclude with implications of the results and future research directions.

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21044

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jamist:v:60:y:2009:i:5:p:933-952

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://doi.org/10.1002/(ISSN)1532-2890

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology from Association for Information Science & Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().