In the last year of so of grad school, several of my fellow students at a similar stage in the program started doing “paper swaps” before a big deadline. This was an awesome idea brought to us by @jennthom. Each person who was submitting a paper agreed to review at least one other paper, in exchange for feedback on their own paper. This brilliant plan had many benefits: it encouraged each of us to finish things a *little* bit earlier than we would have otherwise, we got to learn more about what our colleagues were working on, and of course we both received feedback on our own papers and got to practice giving feedback to others. The main drawback was that it created more work at an already busy time.

An added benefit not obvious at first was that when it came time to write rebuttals to reviews for submitted papers, we had a group of people who were familiar enough with the papers in question that we could read each others’ reviews and make suggestions for the rebuttals. The great thing about this group of people was that it seemed like nobody was overly sensitive about sharing their reviews — and I think that this was a great learning too for all of us.

I have two questions based on this reflection about paper swaps and sharing reviews, and I’d love feedback if anybody happens to notice this post and wants to share:

1. How do I get something like this started at a new institution? I think what we did in grad school worked because we were a fairly small group who both trusted each other to be helpful, and were in serious need of feedback. I certainly learned a LOT from the experience, and think it would be super valuable for other students to participate in something similar. But how do I convince people the extra work is worth it, and that there is nothing to fear from sharing reviews? To that end, I am perfectly willing to share my own reviews on both accepted and rejected papers, which brings me to my next question…

2. Is it appropriate to share publicly, like on the Internets, reviews for one’s own papers? Would it just be too confusing for people if there were multiple versions of a paper, or even papers that never ended up being published, available on an author’s website along with the accepted papers (even if there were a separate page for them or something)? Would anyone even be interested in seeing these things? Also, do reviewers expect that what they write will be held in confidence? Personally, I always write reviews (and everything else for that matter) as if I am writing for an unknown, public audience — it is so easy to share these things, you never know who might see them. And I don’t want to say anything in a review that I would be unwilling to say to someone in person. I just have no idea how others feel about this.

I also finished a complete draft of my dissertation and shipped it, in advance of my defense which takes place on Friday August 28. Plus I found a place to live in Chicago, and am in the midst of packing for the move. And, I got my very first smartphone for my birthday — a BlackBerry Curve 8900. I can’t say it has changed my life, but I do really really like it. With all this stuff going on, I feel like I should say something wise and profound about change or new beginnings or something, but I have no idea what that might be. Mostly, I am just taking things one day at a time so it all doesn’t get too overwhelming. I am totally thrilled to have been given this fantastic opportunity for the coming year, and am going to do everything I can to make the most of it.

i was particularly interested in ordering a couple books on academic writing. most of these “how to be a better writer” type of books end up telling me stuff i already know, but sometimes that’s exactly what i need. anyway, one of the books i ordered came in the mail today, called “How to Write a Lot”, by Paul Silvia.

this book rocks.

not because it contains earth-shatteringly brilliant advice, but because it is so matter-of-fact about it. for example,

Academic writing should be more routine, boring, and mundane than it is. To foster a mundane view of writing, this book says nothing about the “soul of writing”, the nondenominational “spirit of writing”, or even the secular “essence of writing”. Only poets talk about the soul of writing. You should write like a normal person, not like a poet and certainly not like a psychologist. And this book says nothing about anyone’s insecure feelings of “defensiveness” and “avoidance”; go to your local bookstore’s self-help section for that. How to Write a Lot views writing as a set of concrete behaviors, such as (a) sitting on a chair, bench, stool, ottoman, toilet, or patch of grass and (b) slapping your fingers against the keyboard to generate paragraphs. You can foster these behaviors by using simple strategies. Let everyone else procrastinate, daydream, complain—spend your time sitting down and moving your mittens.

awesome.

Group information repositories are systems for storing and organizing digital information in a central location that all members of a workgroup or team can access. Despite the importance of the information stored within them, users of group information repositories (like shared folders and content management tools) often struggle to adhere to explicit rules or structures for information labeling and organization. Instead, as content accumulates over time, repositories become more and more disorganized and users have an increasingly difficult time finding the information they need. A group information repository is not a communication system in the same way as instant messaging or email are; nevertheless, words are chosen to represent the contents of documents, and also to suggest relationships among groups of documents. People can effectively communicate and share information with each other face-to-face (for the most part)—why is it so difficult to label and organize documents so that a relatively small group of teammates can find them? Might a social process, like common ground, be at work when the communication is mediated by a group information management system? In this dissertation, I focus on understanding social influences on information labeling, organization, and finding by people in situations that involve some form of collaboration or collective action. Using a qualitative case study of a group information repository and evidence from an experiment, I argue that social factors affect how the information structure of a repository grows and evolves over time, and that the choices and behaviors of users when producing or contributing content determine what can be found and accessed.

online repository
shared archive
group information management system
shared file repository
shared repository
shared information space (courtesy of “Let’s Shack Up: Getting Serious about GIM“)
group information repository

i want something that isn’t too clunky, and doesn’t mean radically different things to different audiences. i hesitate to use the word “collaborative” because i feel like that word often has a “synchronous” connotation, and i feel like most behaviors with respect to these particular systems are asynchronous.

i’ve been using shared repository, but i’m leaning toward switching to group information repository because i feel like that might make more sense to people to whom i will be presenting my dissertation. i also like shared information space, but i feel like the word “space” might be too vague, and besides, i use it in my definition:

a group information repository is an online space used by a workgroup for storing and organizing shared documents and other files.

does it work? any other ideas?

i’m not sure if it is appropriate to blog about a paper you’ve just submitted to a conference, before reviewers have even had a chance to take a look at it. so, i’ll just say it is about how users choose tags in del.icio.us, and is a revision of the paper we submitted to CHI 2008 that was not accepted. which is just as well, i probably couldn’t have afforded to go to Florence, Italy for the conference anyway! CSCW will be in San Diego in November, and will hopefully be much more affordable.

we spent what felt like an inordinate proportion of our preparation time for this paper speculating on how reviewers might receive it. will they think it is an appropriate contribution for this conference? will they be able to understand our analyses (the evidence to support the claim we’re making)? have we cited all the appropriate people? for the first time ever, i felt like i was writing to the reviewers rather than to the general conference audience. i’m not sure if this means i finally “get it” and this is what all successful academics do, or that i’m still hurting over my last few rejections. perhaps since CSCW is a smaller conference than CHI, the reviewers really are representative of the conference audience.

but here’s a bigger question than “should you write to the reviewers”: is it really a contribution if the topic is appropriate, but the statistics are too complicated for the “average” conference attendee? what about the “average” reviewer? if people do not have the necessary statistical background how are they able to evaluate for themselves whether they believe the evidence presented in support of a paper’s findings? can such a paper be considered to have been “peer reviewed”? how does one judge whether the statistics are “too complicated”? does this mean the author should find a different venue, despite the good topical match with the conference? i guess we’ll find out on july 3rd.

one thing we did this year that i thought was pretty cool was a group of us all submitting to the same conference reviewed each other’s papers. not only did this mean we all got feedback before submitting, we also have been exposed to different types of submissions. of course, volunteering to review papers helps with this too, and i have already volunteered. but since this is a smaller conference than CHI and i’ve never reviewed for it before, they might not pick me. finding out which papers from our “CSCW paper exchange” are accepted will help all of us learn what is appropriate for this particular conference.

unfortunately, neither of these writing projects has anything to do with my dissertation. that’s the way it goes sometimes, i guess. you agree to do something months in advance, and when the time finally arrives you have to put other work aside to finish what you’d agreed to do.

i also made some more progress on the Taboo study (remember that?). i transcribed and analyzed some “baseline” sessions to make sure there were no significant differences between the words i used as tasks for the different media conditions. in the experiment i had pairs of friends or strangers play the party game Taboo in four different media conditions: face-to-face, video, audio-only, and chat. i chose Taboo because it is a game where vocabulary matters — word choice under time pressure is the key to success. i was interested in whether performance differences would arise depending on common ground (friends vs. strangers) or communications medium.

media condition was a within-subjects variable, so there was a lot of counterbalancing  going on. i randomly chose 10 words for each media condition, and then stuck with those words throughout the study, introducing a potential confound, since both the words and the media condition varied together. (the alternative would have been adding another variable, “word set”, to the experiment, dramatically increasing the number of subjects required.) so, i ran baseline sessions where i had pairs of people complete all 40 words face-to-face, to find out whether the groups of words were significantly different from each other. i did a quick-and-dirty analysis at the time to make sure it was ok to go ahead with the rest of the experiment — the detailed analysis i finished last week confirmed that the groups of words did not differ in terms of time to complete the tasks, number of clues, or number of guesses. i’ll be putting this project aside for a couple of months while i focus on my dissertation and submissions for CSCW (due in April).

finally, i’d like to introduce the latest canine addition to our household: ursus the labradoodle! he’s 9 weeks old, and starts puppy kindergarten on monday.

Managers Say the Majority of Information Obtained for Their Work Is Useless (Jan 4, 2007, Accenture)

“Managers spend up to two hours a day searching for information, and more than 50 percent of the information they obtain has no value to them. Nearly three out of five respondents (59 percent) said that as a consequence of poor information distribution, they miss information that might be valuable to their jobs almost every day because it exists somewhere else in the company and they just can not find it. In addition, 42 percent of respondents said they accidentally use the wrong information at least once a week, and 53 percent said that less than half of the information they receive is valuable. 36 percent said there is so much information available that it takes a long time to actually find the right piece of data.”

How Executives Stay Informed: A Study of Resources Used and Time Spent Locating Critical Business Information (Nov 4, 2005, Bersin & Associates)

37% of executives spend more than 4 hours per week searching for information; 36% reported spending 2-4 hours. “Considering the typical salary of a top executive, this translates into $1,000 or more per week in time lost through information searches, to say nothing of the cost of not spending this time running their operations. This estimated figure does not include costs associated with lost opportunities, delayed decisions, or other business impacts.”

normally i would not buy a book with the word “self-help” in the title. i’m not sure the genre of self-help books has actually helped anybody. but i’ve gotten out of the habit of writing regularly since finishing my proposal, and i have to admit that i just feel drained and exhausted and out of things to say when i sit down in front of my laptop and try to write. so maybe self-help is really what i need!

this particular book by Boice got favorable reviews on Amazon, and i was able to find a few more reviews floating around the Internet that were also favorable. i’ll keep you posted!