Paper, Piles, and Computer Files: Folklore of Information Work Environments - analysis of literature that addresses how folklore elements influence current trends in cyberspace information system work places

Library Trends, Wntr, 1999 by Laura J Neumann

INTRODUCTION

   I sit in the middle of the room at a round table that barely leaves space
   to pass around it. According to the sign on the open door, there are four
   people assigned to this cubicle, each facing one corner. Around the
   perimeter of this little--maybe 10 foot by 10 foot--room is desk space and
   counter space. There are drawers underneath the counters and shelves above;
   computer monitors serve as place markers for the occupants of this
   workplace.

      The variety and accumulation of things implies that the inhabitants of
   this cubicle have been here for some time. The shelves are full of mainly
   books and binders; the counters are piled high with papers, folders, and
   binders. A box for a chess set is crammed on one shelf where it threatens
   to fall along with boxes from Mathematica, Office 95, and other software
   packaging. There are at least a dozen different coffee mugs and soda cans
   scattered throughout as well as a small pot for heating water on an upper
   shelf supporting a row of unlabeled binders. There are four Unix
   workstations, two personal computers, and a Macintosh computer set at
   various points on the counters, and all but the PCs are on, humming and
   drawing line patterns over and over. The walls have calendars, a graph of a
   three dimensional parabolic curve, and children's watercolors. When I look
   at the contents of the table before me, I find blank paper and overheads,
   paperclips, a bus schedule, a German-English dictionary, and a geometry
   text 1948 copyrighted. Its dog-eared pages have layers of different
   handwriting, different colors of ink, and its cover is stamped "Property of
   North High school."(1)

WHAT IS A FOLKLORE OF SPACE?

There is a great depth, breadth, and diversity of resources in the information work environment described earlier. The information in this environment lies not only on the written pages of books, photocopies, and computer screens, but in how they are organized and piled (either deliberately or accidentally) and placed in relationship to each other and the occupants of this space. An outsider to this space can learn a great deal about the people who work here and the nature of their social relationships to each other and to their larger social group. The space contains information about the organization they work for in the quality and quantity of the things in the room, what is or is not visible, and the range of resources displayed. An investigation of environment and material, verbal and ritual lore that addresses these issues is a folkloric study of space.

Typical folkloric studies emphasize the way individuals carry out or enact folk practices in the material environment with attention to verbal and customary lore. For example, based on the description above, research questions might include: How is information stored and conveyed in this setting? What are the organizational practices at play? What work tasks are carried out here? To what social and cultural groups do these people belong? How are the various materials working together? How is this space personalized and why?

These questions are based on the idea that the practices displayed here are learned behaviors with some individual variation, and that investigating this environment would give some information about how members of the larger folk group(s) involved might also behave. Methods involved in answering these questions range from collection of artifacts to historiography to ethnography, using folk groups as a central unit of analysis. For the physics researchers described above, folk group memberships would include academia, physics as a field, their particular department, their research group, and so on. As research on information work spaces now stands, there is a large body of literature that deals with the information work environment but not with folkways. In the folklore literature, there is some research on environment but largely not on the information work environment. There are a few areas of research that fall somewhere between these two positions.

This discussion broadly reviews some of the research from a wide variety of fields and what they can tell us about work environments and space, what perspectives have been used to address space, and particularly the dialectic between how people shape and structure their environment, and how people are shaped and structured by their environment. The goal here is to bring these diverse pieces of research together in a way that has not been done before in order to create a starting point for research on the folklore of information work environments similar to the one described at the beginning of and throughout this article.

WHY A FOLKLORE OF SPACE?

Most studies of work that feed into library and information science (e.g., in terms of creating tools for people; learning about how people communicate, use tools, and share information) do not take the things that surround workers and the material and cultural conditions of work into account (e.g., Barreau, 1995; Kwasnik, 1991; Nardi & Barreau, 1995, 1997). However, the research on more singular elements in the work environment (such as people's reaction to windows or how e-mail is used) can be used as a starting point for research. There are some exceptions in which a holistic picture of work and environment is developed that will be discussed later. The research approach that is best suited to dealing with work space is drawn from folklore, and it brings material, verbal, customary, and ritual lores together under one framework of study; thus this article is about launching a folklore of information work space.