Exploiting the social & cognitive dimensions of document genres to improve the reading of digital content at the government of Canada: Results of a pilot study
✍ Scribed by Inge Alberts; Suzanne Bertrand-Gastaldy
- Publisher
- Wiley (John Wiley & Sons)
- Year
- 2007
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 22 KB
- Volume
- 43
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0044-7870
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Even with the ever increasing refinement of technological solutions, improving the reading of textual information remains a challenge for organiz ations. In order to fulfill their various information needs, the employees still require t he consultation of several digital sources and tools (these include, for instance, electr onic document management systems, commercial databases or generic search engines availa ble on the Web). Consequently, the employees must deal with an impregnable tech nological tower of Babel where interfaces that present different languages, funct ionalities, digital formats, and document structures meet. It is not atypical to see users developing time-consuming and costly strategies to adapt to these systems with ad hoc me thods that are rich in insights with the users' innovative capabilities.
Works on user-text interaction in digital environments have proven that the exploitation of genres constitutes a research field with growing potential. The "genre" is a category of texts that presents an information architectural model coupled with implicit rules that dictate the context of document production and use. At a socia l level, genre reifies the practices of a community while alleviating the communicative processes between the different members. At an individual level, genre is a cognitive resource reducing the complexity of reading behaviors (selective scanning, in-depth reading, random