Managing references by filing and tagging: An exploratory study of personal information management by social scientists

Abstract

This paper presents the preliminary results of a cognitive ethnography of the personal information management (PIM) practices of five social science researchers. Based on video-recorded interviews involving guided tours of our informants’ personal digital spaces of information, we study how they create digital workspaces that support their informational activity. We introduce a semio-cognitive theoretical framework to elucidate the relationships between the users’ informational activity, the technical and semiotic properties of the software tools they use, and their conceptual models of these tools. Based on this framework, our analyses of PIM practices highlight how conceptual models play a mediation role between the affordances of the tools and the activities that they support.