The Art and Science of Documentation Management

Tonfoni Graziella, Jain Lakhmi

Description

As information becomes increasingly accessible through newly-introduced technologies, the human mind seeks a more comprehensive interpretation of the world in which we live. In order to manage this information overload, we must carefully reconsider our attitude towards documentation. While acknowledging the value of the standard guidebooks' hard rules on documentation management, Tonfoni advocates a new approach that promotes additional skills required for consistent decision-making, such as information sensitivity. This book has been conceived as a movie on paper, and as such, can be considered a 'documentary on documentation'. Readers are invited to analyse their own reading experience throughout a set of pages, to become 'interactive on paper'; some space is intentionally provided for practice and annotation. Exercises are included to help readers consolidate new skills, through an innovative 'learning by seeing' experience. Since history is based on documentation, every e-mail or memo we write becomes a part of our individual history. This book will be invaluable to those whose careers rest on accuracy, who need to create both succinct and clear reports and presentations.

Chapter One

Documentation management: an art and a science

Chapter Two

Documentation management through metaphors and analogies

Chapter Three

On envisioning documentation

Chapter Four

On iconizing documentation

Chapter Five

On visualizing documentation

Chapter Six

A few more exercises

Chapter Seven

Conclusions

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Technology Policy
• Public Policy
• Political Science
• EDUCATION
• Science

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841508757
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

The Art and Science of Documentation Management
Graziella Tonfoni with Lakhmi Jain
Professor Dr. Graziella Tonfoni was born in Bologna, Italy on July 23, 1957. She attended the Liceo Classico Galvani and passed her final exams with 60/60 cum laude in 1976. She was selected among the 50 top students in Italy and got the Ettore Majorana Certificate in 1975. She got her Doctor Degree in 1980 (110/110 cum laude) at the University of Bologna, where she now teaches Computational Linguistics. Also a Visiting Professor at the George Washington University U.S., she is internationally known for her inventions in documentation management, textual theory, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, communications, training, and multimedia education. Dr. Tonfoni was a Visiting Professor at a number of American Universities including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. A winner of the Minerva award, she is the author of more than 100 publications.
Professor Dr. Lakhmi Jain is a Director/Founder of the Knowledge-Based Intelligent Engineering System Centre in the University of South Australia. He is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers Australia, and presented a number of Keynote addresses in International Conferences.
The Art and Science of Documentation Management
Published in Paperback in UK in 2003 by
Elm Bank , an imprint of Intellect Ltd, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK
Published in Paperback in USA in 2003 by
Elm Bank , ISBS, 5824 N.E. Hassalo St, Portland, Oregon 97213-3644, USA
Copyright 2003 Intellect
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
Consulting Editor: Masoud Yazdani
Copy Editor: Holly Spradling
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Electronic ISBN 1-84150-875-6 / ISBN 1-84150-072-0
Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Eastbourne.
Dedication
To our families and friends for having understood and complied with our writing nature and writing instincts
Preface
Why should we change our perceptions on documentation management in the first place?
Well, because we live within such a complex information environment today and we have to cope with such overwhelming quantity of documentation that tools we have, both technological and conceptual, though still useful, are not sufficient and need therefore to be complemented by new visions and new ways of looking at information altogether.
Many of the most significant changes having occurred in thinking or viewing information derive both as a result of newly introduced technologies, tools and theories, and out of the seeking by the human mind for a most comprehensive view and interpretation of the world we live in. If we have lived in a more constrained information environment in the past, and somehow protected by excessive quantities of data, certainly the situation has very much changed.
The present information age challenges us deeply both at an individual and at a collective level; information workload is so immense to trigger new needs and new requests for different strategies, perspectives and ways to cope with day by day struggling for surviving the information workload. Pressured by various kinds of needs and requests, which may be very demanding, we may either collapse or we may evolve our capacity to transform creatively a major problem into a long lasting project meant to stay and to have a most positive impact and very positive side effects.
It really all depends on our attitude and skills: if we start conceiving information as just unprocessed matter to be first analyzed and then be shaped, we may also think of ourselves as artists shaping the world of today, in meaningful ways, meant to stay for the future.
By fully enjoying information, by not opposing it or resisting it, we may undergo a most significant and wonderful experience, the same complex and very rich experience based upon a combination of various skills, practice and techniques, which asculptor may have, when struggling with hard matter such as marble, meant to become a beautiful sculpture at the end.
We may also think of ourselves as painters, accurately mixing colors to create special and unique effects, knowledgeable painters though and skilled too, who need to be expert in the nature of pigments and chemical combinations. Paragraphs we carve with struggle and words we harmoniously combine , may at the end result into documents meant to stay for the future generations, to witness who we were and what we did , and why we did it. Those same well carved paragraphs and sentences may in the present establish understanding and create the conditions for peaceful cooperation among individuals. On the contrary, if paragraphs are not well carved, if words are not harmoniously combined, those same unverified, uncontrolled, ill-formed pieces of text may create the conditions for misunderstanding, disappointment, resistance and even war at the end.
If history is made through documents, it is a fact that we build our own private and collective history on a day by day basis, writing our reports, summaries, e-mail messages, which may be little pieces of a most beautiful mosaic to be completed; on the other hand, if we allow misunderstanding to occur, those same messages, reports and summaries may just become splinters of a disruptive bomb.
It is our competence and responsibility to decide what any document, which comes to us or comes from us, may or should become. Our life is based upon knowledge we are fed with and we feed with, the same care which should be applied to food and nurturing needs to be extended to information and communication for sure.
If it is true that we are the food we eat and the air we breath it is also true that we think through the information we are being exposed to and perform through those communicative tools we have been provided. Major care should be given to all the most important features of the communication world we live in. Challenge and responsibility being the keywords.
But is this a real book?
Books create some kind of expectations such as to find linear text accurately organized in paragraphs and chapters. Well, this book has titles and a table of contents, but those titles are more meant to introduce readers to a set of concepts illustrated through sequences of visuals and schemes, alternated with some explanation and comment, which is there too, in the form of sentences and short paragraphs, con-necting and harmoniously linking visuals, which constitute the prevailing part of the book anyway.
So, in some ways, this book is a visual book resembling a lot what screenplays are for and it also presents itself as a workbook, really ready to be filled up and completed by the reader with observations, reactions, comments and more derivative thinking triggered by those same concepts, which are illustrated. This is why pages are neither dense nor completely full; they are in fact meant to leave space open for the reader to take turn, pause, think, visualize and proceed forward.
Why was this book conceived and designed this way?
Well, there are already plenty of good manuals describing textually and linearly what has been done in documentation, what is being done and what should be done, providing guidelines in a detailed way.
No reason to add one more book to an already quite extended, rich and thoroughly thought through literature. But documentation management is not purely based upon rules, and if specific guidelines are important, they are not really enough. Managing documentation and trying to extract meaningful information, as to proceed toward consistent decision making, resides upon a whole set of quite complex skills and, above all, on a real information sensitivity.
Aim of the present book is to promote such sensitivity, providing readers with a whole set of visuals and representation models, which are meant to enhance their capability of thinking documentally and to teach how to penetrate each single document in depth and through all of its layers, placing each single piece of information in context and analyzing it both multidimensionally and dynamically.
Pages are not completely filled up as to allow readers to fill them up themselves with examples coming out of their own day by day experience. Some paragraphs are meant to be for brainstorming more than for providing immediate solutions. Sensitivity to documentation issues results from a very specific and complex competence in mastering a whole diversified set of tools. Many and complex are those aspects of communication, which do come into play.
Just like a movie, which may have both very long shots and very slow ones alternating with very short and fast sequences, this book shows a real alternation of slow and fast sequences; by having been so designed, it is actually meant to help readersgain insight, by accompanying them throughout a set of quite diverse experiences. Some of these experiences are intentionally planned to promote rethinking and awareness about what it really means to access and use documentation consistently, as to reach the most appropriate kinds of conclusions and build knowledge correctly upon them.
As pointed out before, there is already a quite extensive, valuable and very detailed literature in the field on documentation management. As author of a specific approach to the problem of envisioning documentation management altogether, Professor Tonfoni felt the need to take another route and very much a complementary one, so this is not one more book to add to the current literature, and it is not even quoting other manuals all that much. Though we have a lot of respect and appreciation for most of the work which had been carried on in the field, this is rather a manual and a textbook on its own