Electronic Paper

Collaborating on document preparation electronically

It's a pain to write large documents with multiple people as authors, editors, critics and reviewers.

The standard way to tackle this task is to ship around multiple slightly contradictory versions of a Microsoft Word document (with changes tracked) in email, and hope that whoever is cutting and pasting can make sense of the mishmosh that sometimes happens. Occasionally the problem of coordination gets severe enough that you call a meeting, lock everyone in the same room with their laptops and a printer, and only let them emerge when a final draft appears.

The nouveau way to tackle the task is to put everyone in a collaborative document editing environment - e.g. a wiki - and push all of your work online. Changes are tracked by default. The writing environment is never what you see is what you get, so there's always the problem of translating what goes onto the screen into something that looks good on paper. If you're lucky, the final document doesn't ever have to hit paper, but you're rarely that lucky.

If anything, it's easier to manage this set of tasks when people are physically distant from each other, since you are forced by space and time to engage in some thinking ahead of time on coordination technology.

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The challenge: tablet PC replaces pen and paper

Eric Mack takes the Tablet PC Challenge:

I've decided to challenge myself to see if I can effectively use my Tablet PC as a total replacement for pen, paper, and books. Next week, I start an intense 8-week business law course and I've decided to use this course as the subject of my next Tablet PC challenge. My objective is to determine what the benefits/drawbacks of using a TabletPC as my sole tool (to replace pen, paper, and yes, even Post-Its) for the next 10 weeks. I've previously blogged about scanning and annotation tools. Now, I'm going to see if I can live with all of these tools in an intense way for the next two months. I figure this will be the tipping point for my use of a Tablet PC. Through this experiment, I'm certain to find things that I like, things that I dislike, and hopefully, a suitable collection of tools and best practices to help me use the Tablet in the most efficient way possible.

should be good to watch - in particular there is a whole host of paper uses in small affairs that would to me at least be awkward if I had to have a full-sized computer around to track every grocery list addition that came to mind in the midst of cooking.

Malcolm Gladwell, "The Social Life of Paper"

Searching for method in the mess; a review of The Myth of the Paperless Office.

Malcolm Gladwell, "The Social Life of Paper", MP3, Copyright The New Yorker 2002. This was read for Assistive Media, a free service that provides high quality literary works in digital audio formats for the visually impaired and for those who love the sound of reading.

The full text of The Social Life of Paper is on Gladwell's own site.

More on Gladwell from Jason Kottke.

An excerpt from the article:

The case for paper is made most eloquently in "The Myth of the Paperless Office" (M.I.T.; $24.95), by two social scientists, Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper. They begin their book with an account of a study they conductedat the International Monetary Fund, in Washington, D.C. Economists at the I.M.F. spend most of their time writing reports on complicated economic questions, work that would seem to be perfectly suited to sitting in front of a computer. Nonetheless, the I.M.F. is awash in paper, and Sellen and Harper wanted to find out why. Their answer is that the business of writing reports—at least at the I.M.F.—is an intensely collaborative process, involving the professional judgments and contributions of many people. The economists bring drafts of reports to conference rooms, spread out the relevant pages, and negotiate changes with one other. They go back to their offices and jot down comments in the margin, taking advantage of the freedom offered by the informality of the handwritten note. Then they deliver the annotated draft to the author in person, taking him, page by page, through the suggested changes. At the end of the process, the author spreads out all the pages with comments on his desk and starts to enter them on the computer—moving the pages around as he works, organizing and reorganizing, saving and discarding.

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Noguchi Yukio's chronological ordering system for paper documents

Filing is a never-ending task with paper documents. Here is a novel approach. From Linking Chan/Seon/Zen Figures and Their Texts: Problems and Developments in the Construction of a Relational Database by Michel Mohr in the Journal of Digital Information v3n2.

3.4 Classify or Not? Parallel Treatment of Analog and Digital Information

Researchers often spend far more time collecting and storing information than they do analyzing it and using it to formulate new hypotheses. In the humanities, figures indicate that as much as 80 percent of our time is dedicated to mechanical tasks, among these the classification of documents. Noguchi Yukio 野口悠紀雄 argues that for the individual researcher, classification is an endless and fruitless task (1993, 1995, 1999, 2000), and proposes that library-type classification by subject be discarded in favor of chronological ordering (that is, ordering on the basis of what document has last been used). His method basically involves putting all material into A4 envelopes and placing the most recently used envelope at the end of the row. Having applied it to my own work for the past two years I am completely free of the "lost child syndrome" ("Now where did I put that piece of paper!").

Noguchi's ideas are largely inspired by discoveries related to the use of computers. He argues that although we have entered the age of digital information, our thinking is still largely conditioned by habits inherited from our long dependence on paper. We have been led by force of habit to believe that if information is not properly labeled or classified then it will be impossible to find when needed. Noguchi shows, however, that this is not necessarily the case.

Nevertheless, when building a database there seems to be no way to avoid using fields, which amounts to classifying. Similarly, the entire process of tagging, be it in SGML or XML formats, involves labeling items of knowledge, often for commercial purposes. The digitization of data in itself does not necessitate classifying, but the use of database applications compels it to a certain extent. Categories, even the most sophisticated ones, once used necessarily reflect the limits of our vocabulary and conceptual horizon.

Studying the history of religions implies the willingness to take on the viewpoint of the object of study. When the objects of study are Chan/Seon/Zen figures, this may sometimes demand that we, like Zen monks, impose silence upon our discursive minds and employ our more holistic abilities in order to grasp relationships which are difficult to codify. This should not be misconstrued as a negation of rational ways of thinking, but as an augmentation of them. In Buddhism, after all, the logic of equality precedes the logic of differentiation without invalidating it.

This mimics many people's email filing techniques of just using an inbox to keep documents sorted - Google's GMAIL famously dispenses with any need to file things directly if you don't want to.

European Patent EP 1001354 references this technique and the book "Chou Seiri Hou (Ultra Management Technique)".

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