“Designing end-user information environments built on semistructured data models” by Quan, Dennis A.

This is a thesis, 214 pages. It’s OCRed so I can’t easily post favourite snippets. Sob. 😭 So here are some interesting bits:

  • Chapter 2.2, psychological problems in data retrieval. Talks about the need to sort information clearly when there is too much. Classic “big data is a problem”. Can reference Bush’s memex idea from 1945 - even 75 years later, we haven’t solved big data problems.
  • Chapter 8,
    • “Finally, we show with a user study that multiple categorisation - allowing resources to be in more than one collection at once - is superior in many respects to the hierarchical folder schemes in popular use today.”
    • It asserts that few modern interfaces make it easy to multiple categorise files. This is too old to cite anymore (18 year old thesis), but maybe look into papers on tagging (i.e. multiple categorisation…) that are more recent?
    • Chapter 15 - Page 185 bioinformatics scattered identifiers and lack of integration problem is identified, good place to cite. Also suggested unified identifiers (lol).

This also links me to Lansdale’s 1998 “The psychology of personal information management” good for citing that items need multiple categories.