The second talk in this morning’s session is Kate Forbes-Pitt (LSE).

Her first point – Documents vs Content. For some reason Users like Documents – but why is this? What has this got to do with quality?

Richard Boland said “information is in-forming, it is a change in a person from an encounter with data”

Bob Hughes and Val Keen said “Getting ideas across can be a tricky process. Human inventiveness draws on all resources – down to the look, the feel and even the smell coming off a document”

Anyway – Users ask for documents – why? Perhaps because this is how they get their information and share it. They believe this to be efficient because they are familiar with the process. They think documents communicate information effectively. They already have them – so

Just digressing to dispute Kate’s definition of a ‘document’. She starts by suggesting it is a ‘piece of paper with writing on it’. However, I disagree – to me a ‘document’ is a set of information collected together and delivered in a single form – so for me a pdf can be as much a document as a piece of paper.

Kate is trying to demonstrate something about a document. By showing a graphical representation of a letter, she shows that we all immediately recognise the ‘pattern’ of a letter – even though the picture contains no written information.

So (Kate argues) a letter is a social construct – it is a document in a sense that a pdf isn’t. We don’t just see a letter as a collection of information – we understand it in a deeper (social) way.

So – Kate argues that when you put a document on the web, you don’t reproduce the ‘information’ contained in the original document.

Kate is now outlining Rules of interaction regarding documents. With a printed document there is immediate opportunity for pragmatic access. This is not the case with an online document. The level of literacy required is different.

‘Rights and Obligations’ are different – etiquette vs netiquette?

So – a document requires social knowledge in order to interpret it AND the social knowledge required is not available within the document. We recognise a letter as a letter, and understand many things about it and how to relate to it because it is a letter.

I can go along with some of this – I think the point about how we interact with a physical document is really interesting. However, I don’t agree that it ceases to be a document just because it’s medium changes – but I can agree that it becomes a different type of document. If a physical letter is a social construct, surely an electronic letter is also a social construct.

To take an example, I would argue that a txt message is a social construct, but will never be printed. In the question and answer session, I raised this, and Kate seemed to say that for her essentially a ‘document’ is defined by being printed – this seems a fundamentally narrow definition of a ‘document’.

Anyway – I’ve digressed in my own arguments here so much that I have missed blogging quite a bit of the tail end of Kate’s talk. But the overarching message that I think is coming across, and that I agree with completely, is that we need to be very aware of the social context of our information, and the social rules governing our users interaction with that information vary depending on the format in which the information is delivered.

So – what does this mean to us as web managers? An example is the ‘online prospectus’ (this got a lot of discussion in the Q&A). We started by having a printed prospectus, and putting it on the web. We have moved towards having a website, and then producing a printed prospectus based on the same information. Perhaps we are moving to a different idea of what a ‘prospectus’ is. Just to bring some Web 2.0 type thinking here – perhaps we should be looking towards interactivity (‘live’ assistance in applying and finding your course), and community contributed feedback.