PIM Book overload part 2: Keeping Found Things Found - The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management by William Jones

And another one! Books on PIM are just like London buses!

“Keeping Found Things Found” is by William Jones at UW (where does he find the time? ;-), and shares its title with the research group where he works. I’m working my way through this one, so more details soon.

In the meantime: 

• Link to buy at Amazon (Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management (Interactive Technologies) but don’t forget about your local bookstore.

PIM Book overload part 1: Personal Information Management by William Jones, Jaime Teevan, and a cast of thousands

   Well, all of a sudden, there’s a lot of books on Personal Information Management. William Jones at UW has been particularly productive! The first book is called “Personal  Information Management”,  and is an collection of papers by many of the top researchers in the field, edited by William Jones (UW) and Jaime Teevan (MSR). Many of the papers were the result of the PIM 2006 workshop in Seattle, and are grouped into four main sections:

1. Studies of PIM behaviour
2. New technology - Email! search! structure! I’m particularly excited to see Diane Kelly and Jaime Teevan’s chapter on evaluation. Cool technology is one thing, seeing if it can be used, let alone helps the user, is quite another!
3. PIM and the individual - The 2 chapters highlight individual differences between users, and how the management of personal health information is an important PIM domain.
4. PIM and group information management

Full TOC below. You can buy from Amazon (Personal Information Management) or go support your friendly local bookstore … !  TOC 1. Introduction

William Jones (University of Washington) , Jaime Teevan (Microsoft Research)

Part I. Understanding Personal Information Management2. How People Find Personal Information

Jaime Teevan (Microsoft Research), Robert Capra (University of North Carolina), Manuel Pérez-Quiñones (Virginia Tech)

3. How People Keep and Organize Personal Information

William Jones (University of Washington)

4. How People Manage Information over a Lifetime

Catherine C. Marshall (Microsoft)

5. Naturalistic Approaches for Understanding PIM

Charles M. Naumer (University of Washington), Karen E. Fisher (University of Washington)

Part II. Solutions for Personal Information Management 6. Save Everything: Supporting Human Memory with a Personal Digital Lifetime Store

Desney Tan (Microsoft Research), Emma Berry (Addenbrooke’s Hospital and Microsoft Research), Mary Czerwinski (Microsoft Research), Gordon Bell (Microsoft Research), Jim Gemmell (Microsoft Research), Steve Hodges (Microsoft Research), Narinder Kapur (Addenbroke’s Hospital), Brian Meyers (Microsoft Research), Nuria Oliver (Microsoft Research), George Robertson (Microsoft Research), Ken Wood (Microsoft Research)

7. Structure Everything

Tiziana Catarci (Università di Roma “La Sapienza”), Luna Dong (University of Washington), Alon Halevy (Google), Antonella Poggi (Università di Roma “La Sapienza”)

8. Unify Everything: It’s All the Same to Me

David R. Karger (MIT)

9. Search Everything

Daniel M. Russell (Google), Steve Lawrence (Google)

10. Everything through Email

Steve Whittaker (University of Sheffield), Victoria Bellotti (PARC), Jacek Gwizdka (Rutgers)

11. Understanding What Works: Evaluating PIM Tools

Diane Kelly (University of North Carolina), Jaime Teevan (Microsoft Research)

Part III. PIM and the Individual  12. Individual Differences

Jacek Gwizdka (Rutgers), Mark Chignell (University of Toronto)

13. Personal Health Information Management

Anne Moen (University of Oslo and University of Washington)

Part IV. PIM and Other People 14. Group Information Management

Wayne G. Lutters (University of Maryland), Mark S. Ackerman (University of Michigan), Xiaomu Zhou (University of Michigan)

15. Management of Personal Information Disclosure: The Interdependence of Privacy, Security, and Trust

Clare-Marie Karat (IBM TJ Watson), John Karat (IBM TJ Watson), Carolyn Brodie (IBM TJ Watson)

16. Privacy and Public Records

Michael Shamos (CMU)

17. Conclusion William Jones (University of Washington), Jaime Teevan (Microsoft Research)

PIM Workshop at CHI2008 - accepted papers

Accepted papers have been announced for the Personal Information Management workshop at CHI2008 in Florence.

Loads of good stuff (see full list of accepted papers), but here’s a few highlights which caught my eye:

• “Evaluating Personal Information Management Using an Activity Logs Enriched Desktop Dataset” (Sergey Chernov, Gianluca De martini, Eelco Herder, Michal Kopycki, Wolfgang Nejdl) - real-world evaluation is a key challenge for the PIM community. The very nature of personal information means its hard to get access, hence the need to construct data-sets of test corpora, similar to those used in the Information Retrieval community.
• ” From Novice to Expert: Personal Information Management Behaviors in Learning Contexts” (Deborah Barreau) - Deborah wrote one of the seminal early 90s papers on digital PIM so I look forward to hearing about what she’s working on now from the perspective of Educational IT.
• “ An Overview of Web-based Monitoring: Future Directions and Challenges” (Melanie Kellar) - Melanie, one of my colleagues at Google UX will be talking about her PhD work on online information seeking and associated management practices such as bookmarking.
• “Collaborative Personal Information Management With Shared, Interactive Tabletops” (Anthony Collins, Judy Kay) - I’m intrigued, dare I say it all sounds a bit oxymoronic ,”Collaborative personal” …?

See you there?

PIM as peformance art - list slammin’

Two list slams are happening next week in the SF Bay Area c/o Sasha Cagen:

• Tues., Jan. 8, 7:30 pm, Modern Times Books, 888 Valencia Street, San Francisco
• Thur., Jan. 10, 7 pm, Red Hill Books, 401 Cortland Avenue, San Francisco (upcoming)

I’m going to try and make the first, I’m intrigued to see how performance-y its going to be …

Personal information heath - 2 stories from the NY Times

Not one but two stories in this week’s Health section (yes, yes, I know I’m getting to that age when I don’t throw Health sections straight in the recycling bin!)

• A Clutter Too Deep for Mere Bins and Shelves - Hoarding and too little organization can be bad for you. My favourite quote from this article, focused on the physical world, is “How are you going to shoot a couple of hoops with your son if you can’t even find the basketball?”. Suffering from chronic disorganization? The National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization can help. Interestingly the article does not consider the opposite end of the spectrum - and the health issues connected with being over-organized.
• Giving Disorganized Boys the Tools for Success - Some parents are paying “organizational tutors” to help their kids organize their time and stuff. Commentary: When will kids start paying someone to help their parents manage their email?

Personal information culture - Sasha Cagen’s To-do List

Sasha Cagen, a near-neighbour of mine in San Francisco, has published a book all about to-do lists - To-Do List: From Buying Milk to Finding a Soul Mate, What Our Lists Reveal About Us.

One of my complaints about HCI research into PIM is that it focuses on the organization and dis-organization of scientist, engineer, and business-y types. In contrast, “To-do list” is refreshingly real world. The book is itself a list - a list of to-do lists from all aspects of life - new years resolutions, lists you make whilst bored at work, relationships, shopping and more. All the lists were sent to Sasha’s To-do list magazine and blog, and each comes with a background story from the original list author, and a related “DIY list idea” from Sasha.

I couldn’t resist a list of some of my favourites:

• A recovering list obsessive
• Contacting God
• Lofty goals
• The list that won’t die
• A list in code

Get yourself a copy to balance out your PIM bookshelf!

MyLifeLots - Gordon Bell in the New Yorker

Its not every day that PIM makes it into the hallowed pages of the New Yorker. Well, May 28’s New Yorker has an interview with Gordon Bell of MyLifeBits fame - a “lifelogging” project which is archiving a stream of his life experiences - well that much which is currently digitisable:

• Photos (58000 and counting, thats nearly as much as some of my more prolific Flickr contacts). For this he uses a “SenseCam”, a device he wears round his neck which uses infrared to detect people and scene changes which it promptly takes a photo of.
• Phone conversations (I wonder if he plays a “this conversation may be recorded for life archiving purposes” when calling data centres)
• Window management on his desktop - e.g. opening and closing applications
• “Ephemera” such as wine bottle labels.

Although the article has little new in the way of technology - it does have a few interesting anecdotes:

• Bell cites 3 major “eiphanies” in starting MyLifeBits - (1) Raj Reddy’s late-90s book digitization project made him realise the technology was possible, (2) Vannevar Bush’s legendary Memex papers of the 1940s were an early influence, raising the possibility of hyperlinked documents and images,  and (3) a desire to make a “personal transaction processing system”, one which can prove you did X or said Y at time Z. Maybe this will come bundled with MS Windows 2008? (-;
• Bell has a personal assistant to help him with the scanning. I think we can forgive him this, he’s in his 70s.
• Retrieval is still the challenge. Modern computer technology makes experience capture and storage trivial. However, how does one get back to that particular photo of the cute girl you met at the party last week? Microsoft’s Horowitz details time-based retrieval techniques (e.g. show me “July 4th 2007″ but it remains to be seen how well this scales to an archive of the size of Bell’s)
• Bell is based in San Francisco where he likes to stir things up by wearing a C.I.A. cap. I like his style!

More on MyLifeBits here.

New book on Personal Information Management

I’m excited to blog about a new book on Personal Information Management from MIT Press which summarizes a lot of recent research in the field, “Beyond the Desktop Metaphor - Designing Integrated Digital Work Environments“.

I’m especially excited since I co-authored a chapter with Victor Kaptelinin of Umea University in Sweden in which we discuss 2 academic systems which explore the potential of improving integration between PIM tools. One of which is WorkspaceMirror, a lil’ sideline which kept me awake at night for a few years of Phd-dom.

So, whats in the book?

1. Introduction: The Desktop Metaphor and New Uses of Technology - Victor Kaptelinin and Mary Czerwinski
2. Beyond Lifestreams - The Inevitable Demise of the Desktop Metaphor - Eric Freeman and David Gelernter
3. Haystack - Per-User Information Environments Based on Semistructured Data - David R. Karger
4. Explorations in Task Management on the Desktop - George Robertson, Greg Smith, Brian Meyers, Patrick Baudisch, Mary Czerwinski, Eric Horvitz, Daniel Robbins and Desney Tan
5. Personal Role Management - Overview and a Design Study of Email for University Students - Catherine Plaisant and Ben Shneiderman; Assisted by H. Ross Baker, Nicolas B. Duarte, Aydin Haririnia, Dawn E. Klinesmith, Leonid A. Velikovich, Alfred O. Wanga and Matthew J. Westhoff
6. Soylent and ContactMap - Tools for Constructing the Social Workscape - Danyel Fisher and Bonnie A. Nardi
7. Supporting Activity in Desktop and Ubiquitous Computing - Stephen Voida, Elizabeth Mynatt and Blair MacIntyre
8. From Desktop Task Management to Ubiquitous Activity-Based to Computing - Jakob E. Bardram
9. Users’ Theories of the Desktop Metaphor, or Why We Should Seek Metaphor-Free InterfacesVincent Tscherter and Pamela Ravasio
10. Toward Integrated Work Environments - Application-Centric versus Workspace-Level Design - Victor Kaptelinin and Richard Boardman
11. Beyond the Desktop Metaphor in Seven Dimensions - Thomas P. Moran and Shumin Zhai

More details, and a sample chapter c/o MIT press.

Want to buy a copy? Make me a few cents with Amazon Affiliates: Buy Beyond the Desktop Metaphor: Designing Integrated Digital Work Environments

Beyond the Desktop Metaphor
Designing Integrated Digital Work Environments
Edited by Victor Kaptelinin and Mary Czerwinski
With contributions by H. Ross Baker, Jacob E. Bardman, Patrick Baudisch, Richard Boardman, Richard Boardman, Mary Czerwinski, Nicolas B. Duarte, Danyel Fisher, Eric Freeman, David Gelernter, Aydin Haririnia, Eric Horvitz, Victor Kaptelinin, David R. Karger, Dawn E. Klinesmith, Hannah Lee, Blair MacIntyre, Brian Meyers, Thomas P. Moran, Elizabeth Mynatt, Bonnie A. Nardi, Catherine Plaisant, Pamela Ravasio, Daniel Robbins, George Robertson, Ben Shneiderman, Greg Smith, Desney Tan, Vincent Tscherter, Leonid A. Velikovich, Stephen Voida, Alfred O. Wanga, Matthew J. Westhoff and Shumin Zhai

April 2007
6 x 9, 400 pp., 65 illus.
$35.00/£21.95 (CLOTH)
ISBN-10: 0-262-11304-X
ISBN-13: 978-0-262-11304-5

Personal Information Management workshop at SIGIR 2006 - papers and posters online

The organisers of the Personal Information Management workshop at SIGIR 2006 in Seattle have released the submitted position papers and posters. No less than 32 accepted submissions which is amazing for a field which was extremely quiet only a matter of years ago. You can also see the report from the previous January 2005 workshop here.

Personal Information Management Research - its all happening in the Pacific Northwest

One thing that always puzzled me during my PhD (which I successfully moved on from in 2004), was the relative lack of academic research being carried out on the area of Personal Information Management (PIM). Its something most computer users do a lot of every day (dealing with files, folders, email, tags, bookmarks, contacts), and often find frustrating (where was that document? my inbox is out of control!). However, back then conferences seemed to be full of research very distant from the everyday problems of users (virtual reality, 3D interfaces, intelligent agents …). It was a lonely place to be doing a PhD …

Luckily, things have moved on and there is now an active community researching PIM. The University of Washington hosted an NSF workshop on PIM in 2005, and is planning another for this year. Also CHI2006 was full of PIM-relevant papers (see my earlier post).

In this blog, I plan to write about current research and exciting development on PIM, and I've been bringing myself back up to date about who's working on the topic. 

One thing that just struck me is the concentration of PIM research in the Pacific Northwest, where there are no less than 3 active research groups. Is it something in the air? Proximity to Redmond?

Here are the 3 which caught my eye.  

• Microsoft Research - PHLAT
• University of Oregon - TaskTracer
• University of Washington - Keeping Found Things Found

Are there any more up there?

In future postings, I'll be reviewing their recent publications, and also moving further afield.