Visualizing Knowledge Work
Note: the bar graph above does not represent time, it represents the artifacts of thought.
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Last week, I wrote the following post about my work — knowledge work. As I said in my post, "Without sketches and words on screen, much of my work would exist in thoughts and conversations."
Last night, I made a list of "the things I think about" and then went through my last three sketchbooks (01 JAN 10 - 05 MAY 10) and digital notebook, Notational Velocity (28 FEB 10 - 05 MAY 10), making hash marks everytime I came across a sketch or note that matched a category. I also added one category I hadn't thought of before going through my notes: "Setting Goals and Assessing Progress."
Comments and faves
opacity added this photo to her favorites. (22 months ago)
billhd (22 months ago | reply)
This is great! We've done some work over the years on this topic - visualizing knowledge work - and so I am really glad to see you take this up!
It looks like your unit of analysis here is an idea as captured in some kind of artifact (text or sketch)...is this right?
10ch (22 months ago | reply)
Bill - exactly. It's my most likely by-product of thinking. Do you have any ideas for other artifacts or potential data sets?
Yourmung added this photo to his favorites. (22 months ago)
billhd (22 months ago | reply)
We've worked with communication events - things that may or may not result in an artifact (or that may become associated with one after the fact) - in an attempt to portray knowledge work in distributed groups. We've worked on several kinds of modeling approaches for visualizing data, and also on several ways to collect and manage it.
Our latest efforts involve some research on "workstreaming" as a visualizing technique for allowing folks to assemble project histories that they can interact with while a project is ongoing (e.g. as an alternative view of an object repository in a CMS)
10ch (22 months ago | reply)
Do you have any data I could play with?
billhd (22 months ago | reply)
we might...working on it. I will send you a pointer.
fabs0192 added this photo to her favorites. (15 months ago)