Preface

This is Part 2 of The Future of Personal Information Management: Transforming Technologies to Manage Our Information.

In Part 1, we covered:

• Introduction to PIM as an area of research and as our daily challenge (Chapter 1).

• Fundamentals of PIM, which discussed the six distinct senses in which information can be considered “personal” and the six basic activities of PIM (Chapter 2).

• Our information always at hand took up problems and possibilities we face when our information is “always at hand” on mobile devices and a general ubiquity of computing (Chapter 3).

• Our information, forever on the Web considered the problems and possibilities of our information living “forever on the Web”—outliving us and standing in reflection of and legacy for our lives (Chapter 4).

Part 3, called Building a better world with our information, will look at:

• Group information management and the social fabric in PIM. How do we preserve and promote our PIM practices as we interact with others at home, at work, at play, and in wider, even global, communities? (Chapter 10).

• Designing for PIM in the development of tools, techniques, and training programs. What principles guide us? (Chapter 11).

• To each of us, our own broaches the larger question of how we assemble and apply what we’ve learned to build a better world with our information and through own custom practices of PIM (Chapter 12).

In the present volume, Part 2, we face a more basic, “show stopper” question: Is personal information management really necessary? Will it be so in the future? Rather than Transforming Technologies to Manage Our Information, a more catchy theme might be “Technologies to Eliminate PIM.” Can technologies do this?

A quick response is to note that, with information so integral to the lives we lead, we will always need to manage it at a personal level even as we seek to manage our lives.

Fine. But can’t we do so in ways that don’t require a separate treatment of PIM? Can’t we just get on with the lives we wish to lead? If so, then isn’t PIM, effectively, eliminated as a separate area of concern?

Consider, for example, the taking of a photograph as an action of information management. We see a beautiful sunset. We are part of a special event such as a surprise birthday party for a friend or loved one. Even as we enjoy the moment an inner voice calls to us. “Stop! Don’t forget to take a picture!” We must then step out of and away from the event in order to create and save an information item, the photograph.

Why do we do this? We do this to “capture” the event or, more accurately, to create a photograph as a way to trigger and share with others our good memories for the event later on. Certainly some of us enjoy taking photographs. Some of us may enjoy playing the role of the photographer at an event. But for many of us, the taking of photographs is tedium and a distraction whether we are taking the photograph or posing while someone else takes the photo. Taking the photograph takes us away from living in the moment and into information management.

Enter the SenseCam.¹ And soon (if not now as you read this) a commercial variant that is small and less obtrusive.² Chapter 3 (Part 1) considers the implication of being about to take a picture—or make a full-motion video—using a camera unobtrusively embedded in a necklace, necktie, eyeglass frame,³ or belt buckle.⁴ In a party area, cameras might be scattered about, embedded within decorations, and placed strategically for coverage. In many homes and offices, the cameras are there already as part of the security system.

A camera worn in this way would be calibrated to take a photo of (approximately) what its owner is looking at. Information so captured might be sent and stored initially on a palmtop device stowed in pocket or purse and then relayed to the Web. The device might be set to snap a picture automatically every few seconds. Or the device might be triggered to take a picture on command—whenever its owner says “say cheese.” The pictures may not be perfect but then neither are the pictures we hurriedly take with our smartphones today. If continuous photo logs are almost here already, continuous full-motion video may not be too far into the future.

Some may recoil at the thought of devices continuously recording our lives. But this is happening already. Walk into any convenience store and we’re likely to be on camera.⁵ Likewise, we and our cars are on camera when we drive through many intersections or, perhaps, when we trigger a “speed” or “red-light” camera.⁶ Attend a public event and we may be captured in hundreds or even thousands of photos and videos taken by surveillance cameras and by other people. If this bothers you, then wear a disguise. The days of public anonymity are over.

On the brighter side, we can now return to our enjoyment of the sunset or the party—already in progress. We’re back to the living of our lives and away from a moment-killing management of information. Our enjoyment of the sunset or the party is, blessedly, PIM-free.

Or is it? To be sure, we’ve mostly sidestepped the burdens of one basic PIM activity—that of keeping. But decisions relating to meta-level activities⁷ of PIM remain. We make these by default even if we do nothing at all. What is our policy, for example, with respect to privacy (and the more general management of information flow)? Do we inform our guests that the room is “bugged” for sight (as well as sound)? Does a red light blink whenever the camera we wear takes a picture?

And how, later, do we maintain and organize (another meta-level activity) the pictures and video clips captured? Many of us already experience gnawing pangs of anxiety at the thought that those digital photos we so easily take may not be really “taken” after all and may easily be taken from us as a web service goes out of business or local storage is corrupted. Even if these photographs aren’t actually lost from physical storage, where are they really? Will we be able to find them again later? Even if we know where to look, will we ever remember to look?⁸

These questions, in turn, bring a rejoinder from the technology advocate. Pictures and videos might be uploaded and shared so that they are robustly stored in many places and, for better or worse, are nearly impervious to the dangers of physical loss. As described in Chapter 3 (Part 1), photos and videos might be interwoven into our item-event logs (“i.e., logs”)⁹ which provide context and a rich source of indexable content to enable us to locate this information later on. Photos and videos are further indexed through technologies for face and scene recognition. Further, the photos and videos we share can be indexed and organized by the commentary of others (see Chapter 10 of Part 3). Let our photos and videos be a part of a never-ending story told, re-told, and continuously enriched by us and an interconnected web of colleagues, family, and friends.

Will technology eliminate PIM? Assuming a world where actions that manage personal information are perfectly in line with and a by product of actions of “life management” we might say “yes.” We could elaborate to say that there is information management, but there is little point to its separate treatment—information management ‘happens’ as an integral part of living.

On the other hand, given that information is a second-hand reflection of life, there are stronger reasons to say “no.” Information management and, at a personal level, PIM must remain separate categories of concern.

We can more easily respond “yes!” to another question: “Will technology transform PIM?” Absolutely. Even if the basic PIM activities are always with us in some form, the actual actions we perform may bear little resemblance to the PIM actions we perform today. If we already notice that we’re using the hanging file folders of a paper filing cabinet much less than we once did, can we imagine a similar trajectory for our use of, for example, the “Save As” dialog as a means of keeping and organizing electronic documents?

Technologies may not eliminate PIM but they will certainly transform it. So the question is “how?” How will technologies transform the way we work with information in our practices of PIM? What about PIM will change or become unnecessary? What will stay the same? And how can we prepare? How can we influence the trajectory of technologies to better suit our needs? How can we transform the technologies that are transforming us?

SAVING, SEARCHING, AND STRUCTURING OUR INFORMATION: THE EXAMPLE OF EMAIL

We can group PIM technologies into three broad areas: Technologies that help us to save (capture, store) our information, search our information, and structure our information. The first two areas, technologies to save and technologies to search, generate tools in support of the many event-driven actions of keeping and finding we do in a typical day. The third technology area, structuring, aligns more closely with meta-level activities of PIM, that is, maintaining and organizing, managing privacy and the flow of information, measuring and evaluating and, most of all, making sense of (using and making decisions based upon) our information. However, as we shall explore later, each technology area—technologies to save, search, and structure—impacts each of the six activities of PIM and each of the six senses of personal information.

Technologies of saving, searching, and structuring. We need all three. The example of email illustrates.

In the early days of email (back in the 1960s and ‘70s), digital storage was dear and the initial focus for email was communication. Little thought was given to saving email messages, either sent or received. Once the message was communicated, we were done. But as storage got cheaper, the value of saving email messages became increasingly apparent.¹⁰ We can check sent email messages to see if we’ve received a proper response or as proof that we’ve responded. We save incoming emails for a closer reading later on, possibly days or even weeks after their initial receipt as our attention finally turns to a related project.¹¹ Even better, this useful log, this memory, is a cost-free by-product of actions we must take in any case: the actions to communicate and coordinate with others.

But as we saved our emails and they continued to increase in number, we needed ways to return to a desired email or grouping of emails. It was no longer feasible to scroll through the entire sent mail folder or the entire inbox.¹²

Search? Until fairly recently search was not supported by an index and could take long minutes to complete. And it frequently failed. For even a reasonably sized email collection, there can be no interactive, exploratory search without the requisite speed-up of an index.

In the absence of fast, index-supported search, people developed sometimes elaborate schemes for the use of folders and tags.¹³

But now that fast, indexed-assisted searching is commonplace, many of us appear to be abandoning our schemes for the manual organization of email. Why bother to organize email into folders for sender and subject if these same groupings can be realized, in seconds, through a simple search by sender or subject?¹⁴ Many of us have taken to leaving our emails in an ever-growing inbox, a practice encouraged by online email services giving large amounts of storage. Do search technologies obviate structure? Not at all. The need for structure remains but is transformed. Email messages have structure already. An email has a subject, a sender, intended recipients, and a record of the time it was sent and received. A search that could not be restricted by this structured information would be far less useful.

Will email go away?¹⁵ Possibly. More likely, email stays but is much less central to our practices of PIM. Email may be pushed aside by other modes of digital communication such as texting, instant messaging, and tweeting. Or, even more so, in favor of persistent “places” of sharing supported by services such as Facebook and Dropbox.

If so, with each alternative to email, we will still be looking to technologies to save, search, and structure in support of managing our information.

Technologies to save, search, and structure. Each will get its own chapter. As we consider each technology in its turn, we pose the same questions. What technologies will the next 10 years bring? What impact will they have on how we manage our personal information? How might even small quantitative changes over time, such as the decreasing cost of storage or the increasing speed of search, produce qualitative changes in the way we manage our information and our lives?

But first, what else? What other technologies are likely to have a major impact on our practices of PIM?

In Part 1 of this book we considered two general areas of impact: 1) Palmtop devices and, more generally, an increasing presence of computing resources. 2) The Web with its world-wide, universal reach as a place we go not only to “read” (and learn about things) but also to “write” (share, influence, convince, impress) and, increasingly, to “execute”—that is, to get things done both in virtual and real worlds.

Input/output, or I/O, is another large area where developments in technology have the potential to have enormous impacts on the way we work with computing devices and, through these, with our information. This is the topic for Chapter 5, the first chapter in Part 2, before we dive more deeply into an exploration of technologies to save, search, and structure.

CAVEATS AND DISCLAIMERS

References to scholarly articles of direct relevance to personal information management (PIM) are grouped together into a bibliography at the end of Part 2.

Web references and references for non-PIM background reading are often included directly in footnotes. I include no references to information you can easily find on the Web. Instead of references, I sometimes include suggested search terms.

I am an unabashed citer of Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/) articles when these are reasonably clear and objectively written. The interested reader should use these articles not as a final destination but as a springboard (through references cited) for further study of a given topic. You the reader may discover—especially if you are expert on the topic of a Wikipedia article (whether or not cited here)—that the article is inaccurate or incomplete. If so, you should change it.

As with Part 1, Part 2 is not a step-by-step “how to.” It aims to help you in your efforts to figure things out for yourself.

Even though Part 2 focuses on technologies of PIM, Part 2 is not a review of the latest and greatest in PIM tools and technologies. Such an effort is out of date even as it is being written. Likewise, Part 2 is no crystal ball. Instead, Part 2 makes reasonable extrapolations from present trends into the future. Also considered is a “present perfect” of basic truths concerning our ways of processing information.

WHO SHOULD READ PART 2?

As with Part 1, Part 2 is intended for the following audiences:

Faculty who are teaching PIM-related courses can use Part 2 for a review of technologies of i/o and technologies to save, search, and structure information—with special focus on the impacts these technologies are having and are likely to have on PIM.

People in PIM research can use Part 2 as an update of PIM-related technologies.

People in related/contributing fields—including human-computer interaction (HCI), information retrieval (IR), library and information science (LIS), artificial intelligence (AI), database management, cognitive psychology, and cognitive science—might find that Part 2 addresses questions similar to those they have concerning the impacts of the technologies reviewed.

People in business can use Part 2 to know “what they should know” about the technologies reviewed especially as these relate to employee productivity and the criteria for the selection of tools spawned by the technologies.

Interested laypeople can use Part 2 to know more about the exciting potential for technologies to impact the ways they manage their information and the ways they lead their lives.

¹ See Gemmell, Williams, Wood, Bell, & Lueder, 2004.

² See http://memoto.com/.

³ See, for example, Google Glass (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass; http://www.google.com/glass/start/) and Microsoft’s efforts to support an “augmented reality” via glasses (http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/11/28/
microsoft_augmented_reality_glasses_patent_rival_to_apple_google_glass.html)

⁴ Try searching, for example, a question like “how small can a camera be?” or “spy camera” to find links such as these: http://www.protectiondepot.com/Spy-Mini-Covert-Cameras.html; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do6m2pKWIZ0; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipstick_camera. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_camera.

⁵ Surveillance cameras played a key role, for example, in case of the Boston marathon bombing prompting discussion afterward concerning the tradeoffs of security vs. privacy. See, for example, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/
2013/04/boston_bomber_photos_the_marathon_bombing_
shows_that_we_need_more_security.html; http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/26/tech/innovation/security-cameras-boston-bombings; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoffrey-r-stone/the-boston-bombing-the-ri_b_3223871.html or try a search such as “surveillance cameras Boston bombing.”

⁶ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_light_camera.

⁷ For a more complete description of meta-level activities of PIM see Chapter 2 of Part 1 (William Jones, 2012).

⁸ See for example Steve Whittaker, Bergman, & Clough, 2010.

⁹ Recall that an item event log is simply a sequence of events each of which, minimally, is stamped with time, location attributes, a URI addressing the item (e.g., web page, local file/folder, email, etc.) and an action taken toward this item (e.g., Open, Close, Create, Delete, Move, Rename, etc.).

¹⁰ See Lovejoy & Grudin, 2003 for a historical perspective drawing parallels between the history of email and the more recent history of instant messaging.

¹¹ I have emails going back for 10 years or more. I used emails sent and received some four years ago to resolve a difference of memories between me and an acquaintance from college.

¹² For studies on the use of email in PIM (with entry points into others), see Bälter, 1997; Bellotti, Ducheneaut, Howard, Smith, & Grinter, 2005; Bellotti & Smith, 2000; Berghel, 1997; Dabbish & Kraut, 2006; Ducheneaut & Bellotti, 2001; Gwizdka, 2002; Mackay, 1988; Whittaker, Bellotti, & Gwizdka, 2007; S. Whittaker & Sidner, 1996.

¹³ See Whittaker & Sidner, 1996.

¹⁴ See Whittaker, Matthews, Cerruti, Badenes, & Tang, 2011.

¹⁵ See Chapter 10, “Email Disappears?” in W. Jones, 2007.