according to features we think we’re likely to remember, for instance by the year in which the photographs were taken or under a name for an associated event (e.g., “Sue’s 50th birthday party”).
Conversely, our efforts to plan a project or to prioritize and complete a set of daily tasks should also impact our management of related information. In fact, the structure of your project, with its various tasks and sub-projects, can form the basis for the organization of related information. A folder that implicitly represents the task to make “hotel reservations” can also contain information concerning hotel alternatives and a reservation confirmation for the hotel actually selected40.
Two sides of the same coin. The same also holds true for our efforts to manage our life’s resources—our money, energy, attention and—the only non-replaceable, non-renewable resource—our time. We can’t effectively manage these without also managing associated information—our account and credit card statements and our calendars.
The PIM perspective gives us a stronger statement still: In a digital age of information, the very management of our tasks, our projects, our money, energy, attention and time are exercises in information management. We “see” our future by looking at the calendar(s) we keep. We feel richer or poorer after looking (on-line) at our checking account balances or the current prices of the stocks we hold. As we do so, we are not looking at and working with the “things” directly. Instead, we are looking at and working with information for these things.
1.4 A SHORT HISTORY OF PIM
Here is a newspaper-style history of PIM.
Ancient times. Great new device released called the “human brain.” Everyone gets one for free but without an owner’s manual. Enormous capacity for storage but input and output can be especially difficult. Development of mnemonic techniques is underway but essential rhyming pattern awaits the invention of buns and shoes.
The ultimate device of PIM was and still is the human brain—with capacities of associative storage and retrieval far exceeding that of our devices—current and conceivable. Various mnemonics41 are essentially information management as applied to human memory.
Since ancient times, human-generated information has taken various external forms from cave drawings to clay tablets to parchment and papyrus to paper. For each form have come tools for writing, storage and retrieval. Tools need to be invented. Consider the vertical filing cabinet—around as long as any of us can remember but invented nevertheless42.
The 1940s: Information is a thing to be captured and measured!
A theory of communication is developed which lays the groundwork for a quantitative assessment of information43. Information can be measured for its capacity to reduce uncertainty. The modern dialog on PIM begins with the publication of Vannevar Bush’s “As we may think” article at the close of World War II (1945). Bush proposed a fanciful “Memex” as “an enlarged intimate supplement to (a person’s) memory” (p. 6).
The 1950s: The computer moves from metaphor to modeler of human thought.
Newell and Simon pioneer the computer’s use as a tool to model human thought44. Inspired by a computational metaphor, Broadbent develops an information processing approach to human behavior and performance (1958).
The 1960s. Mind trips through hypertext, intelligence augmentation and human cognition.
After the 1950s research showed that the computer, as a symbol processor, could “think” (to varying degrees of fidelity) like people do, the 1960s saw an increasing interest in the use of the computer to help people to think better and to process information more effectively. Working with Andries van Dam and others, Ted Nelson, who coined the word “hypertext,” was part of a team that developed one of the first hypertext systems, The Hypertext Editing System, in 196845. That same year, Douglas Engelbart also completed work on a hypertext system called NLS. Engelbart advanced the notion that the computer could be used to augment the human intellect46. In a similar vein, Licklider discussed the potential for a “Man-Machine Symbiosis” (1960). As heralded by the publication of Ulric Neisser’s book Cognitive Psychology (1967), the 1960s also saw the emergence of cognitive psychology as a discipline in its own right—one focused primarily on a better understanding of the human ability to think, learn and remember.
1970s & 1980s. A phrase is born.
The personal computer comes into its own47. The phrase “personal information management” is coined48 amidst a general excitement over the potential of the personal computer to greatly enhance the human ability to process and manage information. The 1980s also saw the advent of so-called “PIM tools” that provided limited support for the management of such things as appointments and scheduling, to-do lists, phone numbers, and addresses. And a community dedicated to the study and improvement of human-computer interaction also emerged in the 1980s49.
1990s & 2000s. A field is born.
The Web is developed50. And so in succession are cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), “smartphones” and integrative handheld devices that can seemingly do everything (except, it sometimes seems, establish a clear telephone connection)51. The process of building a community for the study of PIM began with a Special Interest Group session on personal information management, which was organized as part of the CHI 2004 conference on human-computer interaction52. But perhaps the watershed event in the creation of a PIM community was PIM 2005—a special NSF-sponsored workshop53 held in January of 2005 in Seattle54. The participants formed a nexus for follow-on workshops55, special issues56 and an edited book on PIM57.
1.5 A NEOLITHIC REVOLUTION IN PERSONAL INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
PIM is undergoing profound change. In our efforts to understand and track this change, we search for historical metaphors. This search takes us back in time—farther back than the 1940’s and the dawning of the digital age—all the way back to the Stone Age.
Our ancestors were foragers. Before and even when they could hunt, our ancestors gathered and they scavenged the kills left by other animals. Application of the foraging metaphor has led to the development of information foraging models of PIM58: These models align our PIM activities with the food gathering activities of our ancestors during the Paleolithic age (early Stone Age). Under foraging models, we move from place to place across our informational landscape in ways that maximize the value of the information we expect to receive.
The Neolithic Age59 (new Stone Age) followed the Paleolithic Age and farming followed foraging. Food foraged in the Paleolithic Age was farmed instead in the Neolithic age. Animals once hunted were domesticated and herded60.
What about information farming? Will we “farm” information61 rather than forage for it? And is the foraging model apt to begin with? Underlying both a foraging and a farming metaphor for PIM is a metaphor of information as food.
Is the metaphor of information as food apt?
There are interesting parallels to consider between food and information. Are we getting a “balanced” diet of information or too much informational sugar and fat in the form of, for example, of gossip magazines, celebrity tweets and news shows that treat political debates as sporting contests? Are we becoming informationally obese? We generally know little about the providers of the information
