Unifying PIM Research: Fostering a Connection Between Descriptive PIM Studies and Prescriptive Outcomes General Terms

ABSTRACT Descriptive Personal Information Management (PIM) studies inform us about PIM behavior and their findings should guide the design and development of PIM tools to support the behavior under study. Unfortunately, judging from the literature, descriptive studies do not always provide useful recommendations and PIM tool research is often carried out separately. This paper discusses what appears to be a possible research dichotomy and ways to bring the research back together. Three solutions are suggested: 1) PIM workshops where both types of studies are presented and researchers meet should be important venues for dissemination of results, cross-fertilization between different research areas, and collaboration between researchers; 2) A bridging methodology to translate research findings explicitly into design criteria could bring research and practice closer together; and 3) A general PIM framework based on the three essential PIM activities (finding/refinding activities, keeping activities, and meta-level activities)

Communicating with your E-memory: finding and refinding in personal lifelogs

The rapid development of technology enables the digital capture and storage of our life experiences in an “E-Memory” (electronic–memory) or personal lifelog (PLL). This offers the potential for people to store the details of their life in a permanent archive, so that the information is still available even when its physical existence has vanished and when memory traces of it have faded away. A major challenge for PLLs is enabling people to access information when it is needed. Many people may also want to share or transfer some of their memory to their friends and descendants, so that their experiences can be appreciated and their knowledge can be kept even after they have passed away. This thesis further explores people’s potential needs from their own PLLs, discuss the possible methods people may use and potential problems that they may encounter while accessing their PLLs, and hypothesize that better support of users’ own memory can provide better user experience and improved efficiency for accessing their E-memories (or PLLs). As part of a larger project, three lifeloggers collected their own prototype lifelog collection for about 20 months’ time. To complete this study, the author developed a prototype PLL system, called the iCLIPS Lifelog Archive Browser (LAB), based on the author’s theoretical exploration and empirical studies, and evaluated it using our prototype lifelog collections through a user study with the three lifeloggers. The results of this study provide promising evidence which support the hypothesis. The end of this thesis also discusses the issues that the lifeloggers encountered in using their lifelogs and future technologies that are desirable based the studies in this thesis

Understanding the Complexities of Email Behaviour

This position statement summarises three studies from a project aiming to learn about and support email search behaviour. The findings combine to form a rich and multifaceted picture of user behaviour and demonstrate why it is important to account for user behaviour at all stages of an Information Science project

Haunted by you : a study of the real and psycho-literary space of Jack Kerouac’s Lowell

textThis report argues that through his lived experiences of growing up in his hometown of Lowell, MA, and the joys and traumas he accrued from early childhood and into early adulthood, Jack Kerouac began to rewrite, reimagine, and reconstruction Lowell in several different works and iterations to attempt to address and exorcise the ghosts of his past. For my argument, I study several of Kerouac’s works: Visions of Gerard (1963), Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three (1959), Visions of Cody (1972), and Book of Dreams (1960). Pulling from the fields of Beat studies, literary criticism, childhood studies, psychology, geocriticism, and American cultural history, I attempt to highlight the translation and transformation of Lowell in Kerouac’s texts into a psycho-literary space.American Studie