James Howison

Traces as confirmation:

dealing with split archives and pacing

of life

CC Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/baggis/

Trace Ethno Workshop

iConference 2015

Original work supported by03-41475, 04–14468, 05-27457 and 07–08437

Traces as confirmatory

• Participant observation findings in comparison to studies at the time:– Studies often focused on a single venue

(mailing list, tracker, or source code), but work wound it’s way across multiple venues

– The pacing of traces was vital to shaping interpretation but reading archives disguised this

To the Archives!

The evidence is here, somewhere.CC Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hamadryades/

Release Notes Dev Email Bug Tracker RFE TrackerUser Forum

TaskOutcome

Task

RelevantDocuments

TaskOutcome

Task

RelevantDocuments

TaskOutcome

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RelevantDocuments

CVS

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Illustrative Co-work

Illustrative Individual Work

30 (of 106) tasks consisted of a single Action: Core Production

How to represent pacing?

Time stamps

Representing pacing

• Calculate gaps?

Reading gaps doesn’t help, easy to ignore, make them harder to ignore?

Visualize events