Classification schemes are an important issue in the collective use of large document collections. We have investigated the classification of technical documentations in two engineering domains: a steel mill and a sewerage plant company. In both cases we found a coexistence of different classification schemes and problems resulting from distributed local archives. In supporting human actors to maintain different classifications schemes while working on a common archive, we developed the concept of context grabbing. It allows assigning context information efficiently in the form of metadata. Based on a document management system, a tool kit for context grabbing was developed. Its evaluation in a sewerage service company allows us to comment on important aspects of understanding the role of classifications in collaborative work.
#context-snippets
pg 372
#lit-context
ECSCW is where a lot of the Ethnography in context of Work is still alive (exited somewhat from CSCW), so we can have a bit more confidence that this is done well from a theoretical and methodological perspective
How did the authors approach their questions/problems? ((most of this is going to come from the methods sections, although some info about conceptualization of key concepts might be relevant to pull from intro/lit-review)) #lit-context
What did they find? ((keep this as contextualized as possible; resist the urge to repeat claims or generalizations)) #observation-notes
Decentralized project documentation made recontextualization difficult for engineers because they didn’t know the history of changes for a document or if a particular document was up to date, leading to issues such as “exploratory digging by hand” to avoid damaging power lines pg 375
this is looking pretty good in terms of granularity, i can work with this!
would be nice to know more about what is meant by decentralized project documentation.
probably best to have a separate observation note block that summarizes that (with its own context snippets), and the block ref that into the “decentralized project documentation”.
