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To be tractable is to be easy to manipulate or shape. We want information to have this quality.
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To be tractable is to be easy to manipulate or shape. We want information to have this quality.
Online channels give us incredibly effective tools when we are hunting for information. But the question remains: do we have the right tools for dissecting, cooking, and eating the information we have hunted down.1
Conceptual thinking is about manipulating ideas. Centuries of experience with paper information has given us tools, methods and habits for this.2
For example, with paper documents we might:
Focus on an idea, integrating representations of it from different sources – for example, a set of different documents, viewed together, open at relevant pages.
Compare more than one document, point for point. People often do this by annotating documents or transcribing concepts into tables or diagrams.
Park an idea, so that it is in view but not in play, to remember the fact of its existence. People typically write notes for this, or leave books open on a desk. Or put bills in a pile to remind them to pay at the end of the month.
Connect a number of concepts, from inside and outside of the document to hand. People sort documents in piles, use colour-coded bookmarks, or make lists and sketch diagrams.
Prioritize among a set of possible directions for our thinking. People may transcribe ideas into numbered lists, or sort documents into piles.
Annotate a text element, to capture a thought before it escapes. People underline or highlight documents.
Digital channels haven’t yet emulated all these functions,3 and the direction of travel seems to be: rely on AI. We’ll see how that turns out.
1. I am reminded of the title of a seminal paper by Patricia Wright (1978) – Feeding the information eaters: suggestions for integrating pure and applied research on language comprehension, Instructional Science 7, 249-312
2. Robert Waller (1986) What electronic books will have to be better than. Information Design Journal 5: 72–75.
3. This concept is developed further in Robert Waller (2012) Graphic literacies for a digital age: the survival of layout, The Information Society: An International Journal, 28:4, 236-252.