DRAFT - 27 March 2008 - Making sense of PIM & Photography
Making sense of the PIM practices of digital photographers in serious leisure
Literature review
Kristina M. Spurgin
School of Information and Library Science, UNC Chapel Hill
Advisor: Dr. Deborah K. Barreau
31 March 200827 March 2008
Section: Table of contentsTable of contents ii
DRAFT - 27 March 2008 - Making sense of PIM & Photography
Table of contents
Table of contents 2
Photography in serious leisure and everyday life 2
Everyday life information seeking (ELIS) 2
The Serious Leisure Perspective 3
An overview of the Perspective 4
The everyday 8
Bibliography 9
Photography in serious leisure and everyday life 4
Organization of information 5
Categorization in cognitive psychology 5
Notes on terminology 5
Similarity-based views 5
Explanation-based 9
Holistic views 11
Types of categories 12
Ad-hoc and goal-derived categories 13
Influences on conceptual structure 13
Typicality and graded structure 14
Basic levels 14
Influences on other aspects of conceptual structure and categorization 15
Relevance of cognitive psychology findings to the organization of information 15
Relavence of cognitive psychology in PIM 16
Categorization and classification in LIS 17
Jacob and terminology 17
The development of classification theory 18
Classification as true structure 19
Disciplinary structure and its discontents 20
Post-modern classification 22
The interaction of classification and knowledge in context 23
The structure of information in disciplines (Domain analysis) 25
Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 26
Studies of individual people’s organization of information from an LIS perspective 28
Personal Information Management (PIM) 30
Organization of images 30
Organization of images in institutional collections 30
What is being organized in this domain? 31
Types of images 31
The landscape of the research area 34
Concept-based image description 35
User behavior 45
Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) 46
Organization of images in personal collections 47
The importance of studying the organization of personal image collections 48
Assumptions and misconceptions about personal photo collections 49
Population 49
Contents of the personal collection 50
Print vs. digital photos: a false distinction 50
How people keep and organize their personal photo collections 51
Conventional photos 51
Digital photos 52
Comparing the organization of images in personal photo collections and institutional image collections 57
Conclusions 61
Bibliography 64
Section: Table of contentsTable of contents ii
DRAFT - 27 March 2008 - Making sense of PIM & Photography
This review covers the literature relevant to a study of how amateur digital photographers make decisions about their methods of managing the artifacts and information surrounding their hobby, and how they go about and make sense of changing the structures used to organize these materials.
It will cover the domain of amateur digital photography as a serious leisure pursuit. This includes the notion of leisure itself, leisure pursuits as part of everyday life, and everyday life as an area of inquiry in LIS.
Because the photo is of obvious primacy in the pursuit of digital photography, what follows is an examination of themes and issues of concern regarding access to images. This literature mainly comes from the traditional archives and visual resource library environments. There will be a brief look at the literature on photographs as a specific format. These overall issues may be of some relevance in understanding the individual’s personal photo collection. The little we know about the practices of digital photographers in managing their collections will then be covered.
The personal collection of digital photos is just one type of personal collection. Collecting is an important activity for many people and is one type of serious leisure pursuit. What is a collection, anyway? How does it fit into the personal information environment?
PIM is an area in which much work has been done regarding how people build, manage (or not), maintain (or not) and use their personal information environments. By this definition, it is a form of PIM to manage one’s various collections; however, the bulk of the work in this area has focused on the management of paper and digital files, email, and web bookmarks. What ideas and findings from this work apply to the questions at hand?
Given what we know about personal information structures, it is interesting to move from the micro to the macro level. This is a broadening of scope in two ways. First we will examine theories of categorization and classification structures in cognition. These are shared across humans and apply to all we perceive. Second there will be an exploration of how the development of theories associated with classification in libraries and information systems have in some ways mirrored the developments in ideas regarding categorization in cognition. Here we will also look at how studies of how people’s categorization and conceptual structures have been used to inform design of tools or services in LIS.
Finally, after looking at structures for and practices of organizing information from a variety of viewpoints, we return to the overall questions:
1. From the amateur digital photographer’s point of view, what information and objects does she keep and organize or manage?
2. What structures or systems has she created to manage them?
3. Have these systems and structures changed over the course of her amateur digital photography career?
3a. If so, how did she decide it was time for a change and how did she navigate the decisions involved in implementing that change?
As a methodology firmly dedicated to examining a phenomenon from the individual’s point of view, and understanding how he makes sense of a stopped-situation and moves through it, the Sense-Making Methodology may be useful in answering questions 1 and 3a. A review of the Methodology and its proposed use in this study follows.
Section: Photography in serious leisure and everyday lifePhotography in serious leisure and everyday life 9
DRAFT - 27 March 2008 - Making sense of PIM & Photography
Photography in serious leisure and everyday life
Research on information behavior has long been mainly focused on the workplace. This bias was identified in the late 19--s, and arguments were made that information behavior in other aspects of life are worthy of study. Research on non-work information behavior has increased since then, but the majority of scholarly attention remains on the workplace or classroom. In 1995, Savolainen introduced everyday life information seeking (ELIS) as a name for this growing body of research, then known by such terms as "non-work information seeking" and "citizen information seeking." Since then, the importance of understanding the role of information in all aspects of life has ceased to be a point that needs arguing. The literature on information in everyday life and in "context" continues to grow.
Everyday life information seeking (ELIS)
This section should be first because it frames the context of the entire review. ELIS situates the overall topic within LIS and shows why it is important. Some discussion of conceptualization of everyday life that isn’t covered in LIS.
ELIS as a field of study grew out of a response two step from previous (and still?) proliferation almost complete focus on work contexts in LIS. Studies on "nonwork information seeking" and "citizen information seeking" began to emerge in response to realizing little was known about information seeking outside of work context.
ELIS is defined as "the acquisition of various informational (both cognitive and expressive) elements which people employ to orient themselves in daily life or to solve problems not directly connected with the performance of occupational tasks" (Savolainen 1995, p. 266-7). In addition, Savolainen (2004) later specified that ELIS was not concerned with these topics in the performance of full time study. Below, the term "work" is meant to include occupational tasks and tasks involved in full-time study.
Leisure time refers to free time during which a person has free choice about what to do. Time spent in such activities as housekeeping, food preparation, child care, personal grooming, and sleep are not occupational tasks or full-time study; however, they do not constitute leisure activities because they are obligatory.
Several problems arise with the body of work done under the banner of ELIS.
The first is not just in ELIS but in information seeking research in general. The focus on seeking is problematic, especially in this age of information overload. Finding information is often no longer a challenge. More challenging are choosing a comprehendible amount of the most relevant information, assessing the quality of information one finds, making sense of all of the information at hand, and keeping track of information so that one has it when one needs it. Information use and information behavior are areas of study which address this in a broader way than just information seeking, but certain important aspects of use are still mainly overlooked. [[[I have written this already, somewhere. Spink and Cole. Information literacy. Etc.]]] [[[Also Jenna talks about this in her dissertation, too. Information seeking is too narrow. Information behavior refers to something much narrower than it would seem, as does information use. Need for new term-- I think this is how/why she uses "information activities."
Second, Hartel {Hartel 2007 #40588 /d}{Hartel 2007 #40588} has identified 3 categories of work done in this area and found that the majority of studies frame information seeking and use in a negative, problem based orientation. Kari and Hartel (2007) make the case for a more optimistic approach.
Finally, there is general criticism Like work-related informationthat all of this research on specific slivers of everyday life does not accrete so much as it piles up. In general the sample sizes are small and the findings non-generalizable. It is not clear if or how the populations of interest are related to each other, or what the samples are representative of [[[well, they aren't representative in a strict sense, but how do we know one person's "knitters" are the same as another's or how they are different? Can these knitters at all be usefully compared with the quilters studied by someone else? Etc.]]]
Given Savolainen's definition of ELIS, the time and tasks falling within its interest area may be divided into two categories: leisure and what I will call "everyday labor." Leisure refers to chosen non-work activities that people are not disagreeably obliged to do (Stebbins 2002). Everyday labor includes activities like housekeeping, food preparation, child care, personal grooming, and sleep, which are obligatory but not part of one's paying occupation. ELIS encompasses information acquisition in each of these types of time, but in general little attention in ELIS studies has been devoted to situating the research at hand within the existing knowledge and theory about leisure and the everyday. This contributes to the last problem mentioned above.
The Serious Leisure Perspective
Since Jenna Hartel introduced Robert Stebbins' Serious Leisure Perspective in her work on hobbyist cooks (), there has been a small but growing number of researchers in LIS using the Perspective to situate groups of people and their activities. These will be discussed after a review of the Perspective.
The simplest definition of the Serious Leisure perspective is that it is a theoretic typology of the whole of leisure. In development since 1982, it is rooted in theory derived from data gathered from nearly 30 years of sociological research into specific leisure populations. The Perspective The serious leisure perspective (1) provides a structure for conceptualizing identifying the population any activity as a specific type of leisure, related to other activities and types of leisure in various ways. Situating studies of diverse groups within a common framework, will, over time provide for the accretion of knowledge that is currently lacking in ELIS research.
Using the Serious Leisure Perspective as a lens through which to look at digital photography and its practitioners also provides a way to distinguish between different types of digital photographers, identify which types are of interest in the proposed research, and possibly compare the information practices of different types of photographers in the proposed research or follow-up work. It will also allow for the findings of the proposed research to be compared to other studies on different activities that happen to be the same type of leisure as digital photography.
Finally, though the importance of studying information practices outside the work context is no longer a debated point, the Serious Leisure Perspective has identified many important personal and social functions or participation in certain types of leisure. Urban (2007, p. 39) recently observed that "serious leisure participants look very much like the lifelong learners identified by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and other funding agencies as communities of interest." This lends a greater sense of import to the study of what some may still think of as frivolous pursuits.
An overview of the Perspective
The Serious Leisure Perspective breaks all of leisure down into three main types: serious leisure, casual leisure, and project-based leisure. Before the Perspective is explained, it should be noted that within it activities are categorized or given as examples of different types of leisure, but what the categories are truly describing is a particular mode of engaging in that activity. For example, we can say that watching movies is a casual leisure activity. Watching movies is indeed typically a casual leisure pursuit, but it can be categorized as another form of leisure given a different context or approach to the activity. Systematically becoming an expert on Japanese film by watching and studying the movies over years of one's life would constitute a serious leisure pursuit, while watching a few French films set in Paris to get oneself in the right frame of mind for an upcoming Parisian vacation might be closer to project-based leisure. Not all activities can cross these leisure type boundaries, but many can, including digital photography. The ways in which it crosses boundaries will be discussed after a general introduction and description of the Perspective.
What is leisure?
Before delving into the Serious Leisure Perspective's typology of leisure, it is first necessary to understand what is included in leisure sphere. Attempts to define leisure have primarily been experientially grounded. They are based on how people perceive their own uses of time and activities. Three factors have dominated in the research on what is perceived as leisure. They are: work relatedness, freedom, and motivation. That which is most clearly leisure has been defined as low in work relation, high in freedom, and intrinsically motivated (Iso-Ahola 1979). These factors are not without their critics, and a simpler kind of definition has emerged.