Publication: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)
Context
#canonical paper in lab
#[📝 lit-notes]
Four problems with / created by formalization: 1) cognitive overhead, 2) tacit knowledge, 3) premature structure, and 4) situational structure
Cognitive overhead (aka Cognitive Load): often the task of specifying formalism is extraneous to the primary task, or is just plain annoying to do
Tacit knowledge: if relevant info for developing formalism is tacit, asking people to formalize it will interrupt the task, with serious consequences for the quality of the work
Enforcing Premature Structure: people don’t want to commit until they’re sure what formalism is actually useful for their task (and what’s extraneous and only annoying)
Situational Structure: Useful structures and formalisms vary significantly across people, situations, and tasks
incremental formalization can mitigate costs/risks of formality in interactive systems (section 4.3, p. 347-438)
Basic idea: (mostly) informal entry of information, then defer formalization until later in the task when it is useful
Key advantages:
Reduce initial overhead of entering information
Reduce risk of harm from prematurely committing to the “wrong” structure
Examples of incremental formalization
In the Hyper-Object Substrate system, users enter mostly informal text initially, and the system recognizes patterns in the textual information to suggest possible formal attributes or relations for the underlying knowledge base, which the user can then accept/modify/reject as they wish (p. 347).
Infoscope is a news reader system that suggests filters based on users’ reading patterns; this helps them make their goals explicit which can facilitate formalization after it emerges from their task behaviors (p. 347-348)
VIKI is a spatial hypertext system that includes heuristic algorithms to find recurring visual/spatial patterns in layout of objects; users can use these to specify schemas if they wish