Intimate information: organic hypertext structure and incremental formalization for everyone"s everyday tasks

ABSTRACT

Much of our most important writing is written to ourselves and to our immediate circle of family, friends, and allies. This intimate or nobitic information includes not merely calendars and grocery lists, but also work for planning our future endeavors, as well as correspondence to our future selves and our progeny. Tinderbox is a tool for making, analyzing, and sharing notes -- offers a range of representational tools ranging from conventional links and WikiLinks to prototype inheritance and spatial hypertext. People exploit this complex tool set to help discover and express the structure of everyday ideas; of particular interest is the problem of creating structure for work that has not yet been written and that will evolve in unexpected directions. The history of constructive hypertext and the success of early wikis provides invaluable guidance for structuring nobitic writing tools.

REFERENCES

• 1: Mark Bernstein, Patterns of hypertext, Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia : links, objects, time and space---structure in hypermedia systems: links, objects, time and space---structure in hypermedia systems, p.21-29, June 20-24, 1998, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/276627.276630]
• 2: Michael Joyce, Of Two Minds, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 1994
• 3: T. Mallon, A Book Of One's Own: People and Their Diaries. 1984, St. Paul, Minnesota: Hungry Mind Press.
• 4: J. Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. 2003, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.
• 5: Frank M. Shipman, III , Catherine C. Marshall, Formality Considered Harmful: Experiences, EmergingThemes, and Directions on the Use of Formal Representations inInteractive Systems, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, v.8 n.4, p.333-352, Oct. 1999 [doi>10.1023/A:1008716330212 ]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.4 Hypertext/Hypermedia
          Subjects: Theory

General Terms:
Design, Economics, Human Factors

Keywords:
Nobitic, Wikis, constructive hypertext, personal information