Due: Thursday, 31 Oct 2013, 9am

Submission Requirements:

• One ZIP file named FirstnameLastnameA7.zip, containing two files:
• One PDF named FirstnameLastnameA7Chart.pdf containing a spreadsheet of parts 1, 2 and 3
• One PDF named FirstnameLastnameA7Report.pdf containing your domain sentence (part 0) and reflection (part 4)

In this assignment you will:

1. Restate your domain and clarify its scope
2. Make a list of potential interactions in your A1 organizing system
3. Analyze the designed interactions and create equivalence classes
4. Further classify them based on a few sets of criteria
5. Reflect on the assignment

INTERACTIONS include any activity, function, or service supported by or enabled with respect to the resources in a collection or with respect the collection as a whole.

Your initial task in this assignment is to identify the potential interactions in your Assignment 1 Organizing System. You will then analyze and classify the interactions, and in doing so you will be refining the scope and scale of your organizing system.

Part 0. Write one sentence telling us your domain and its scope.

We know you already submitted a domain in A1, but you man have changed or refined it, or adjusted the scope. This will give us an idea of where you are with that now.

Part 1. Make a list of the potential interactions in your Assignment 1 organizing system. (3 points)

Be creative here. Don’t be limited to the interactions that you can see in other instances of organizing systems in your chosen domain. Aim to have no more than 10 interactions.

If your organizing system is in a domain with physical resources, you should focus on what TDO calls the “designed interactions” that are enabled by intentional acts of resource description and organization. (The same is true if your domain is digital, but since everything must be designed in a digital domain, it’s less of a potential problem.) We don’t want you analyzing interactions that are completely intrinsic and “non-designed”. (Recall the sidebar example in Chapter 1 about the “Digital Zoo” – if you visit an actual zoo, “viewing the animals” is an interaction that doesn’t take much design effort because “viewing” is pretty intrinsic for physical resources. In the digital zoo, however, instead of “access just by looking” you’d need to design and implement some “access via technology” mechanisms for locating and viewing the remote animals).

Some interactions are quite generic and are probably or potentially supported by every organizing system. Examples of generic interactions could be selecting a resource from a set of candidates in a collection, finding a resource that you already know exists, and discovering the identity of a particular resource. Include these in your list, but contextualize them to make them descriptive and relevant.

Again, keep your list to no more than 10 interactions. If you find yourself coming up with significantly more than that, you may need to adjust the granularity of the interactions you’re choosing, or modify the scope of your organizing system.

Part 2. Analyze the designed interactions and create some equivalence classes for those that are similar in function and or implementation. (2 points)

In part one, you will have come up with a collection of all the interesting interactions you can contemplate for your organizing system. In this part, you will classify them. You will want to pay close attention to the granularity of the interactions that you are classifying. For example, some organizing systems may themselves collect information about every single interaction with its resources, the context of that interaction, etc. This “information collection” interaction may be something you want to record and classify, but you would probably not want to list every possible variation or report each one as a separate interaction.

Record each of your designed interactions and their equivalence classes in a spreadsheet based on the attached sample.

Part 3. Classify the interactions based on the following criteria: (3 points)

Record these in the same spreadsheet as in part 2, in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th columns as indicated by the sample.

A. Classify the interactions into those that are 1) based on specific resources (one at a time) or 2) interactions that utilize collection-level properties (i.e. the collection as a whole). (1 point)

B. Separately (independently from part A), classify the interactions into those that are 1) initiated by a user of the organizing system, 2) initiated by the resources themselves, or 3) performed with “mixed initiative” in which both the user and the resource initiate some aspect of their joint interaction. Explain why you chose each classification when you feel it isn’t self-explanatory. (1 point)

C. Take the interactions which you classified in part A as being based on specific resources. Further classify them into those that involve 1) interacting with the original resource, 2) interacting with descriptions of the original resource, or 3) interacting with copies of the original resource. (1 point)

Part 4. Reflect on the assignment (2 points)
Write a couple of paragraphs reflecting on the assignment, including but not limited to:

• Did the number/type of interactions you found, or the difficulty/ease with which you thought of them, tell you anything about the scope of your organizing system?
• Did you find yourself adjusting your scope in mid-exercise? If so, how did you go about this? If not, moving forward, how might you adjust your scope to make it more manageable in terms of identifying and classifying interactions (if needed)?
• Did you find describing or classifying any of the interactions particularly difficult? If so, what was it about those interactions that made it hard?

Starter spreadsheet for parts 1, 2, and 3: Assignment 7 – Spreadsheet