Delivering Information: Document vs. Content: Kate Forbes-Pitt

Persitance of paper – why? … users ask for docs all the time – why? … they trust docs … they’re efficient … we don’t initially ‘read’ a letter – take in structural layout elements – date, who it’s to etc… doesn’t actually have to have words in it … paper docs have smell, touch, feel … content is only one of the layers of a doc … can this be captured online? … ‘old’ social rules masked by ‘new’ online rules … social context not automatable (done electronically) … a bit of philosophy [fine with me] – normative reading is e.g. letters, pragmatic reading is e.g. poster about the world cup … online pragmatic access is lost for many … the social knowledge required by the web is not the same as for paper … impossible to write these down and automate … docs require local and social rules … natural language translation not possible on the web … computer destroys pragmatic accesss ... computer environment has it's own set of expectations and masks document rules ... nautural language translation not possible electronically ... discussion over the notion of a record as opposed to a document - Kate suggests web pages are records and need to rework content for the web [I think this has been quite clear for some time]