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

Even with the ever increasing refinement of technological solutions, improving the reading of textual information remains a challenge for organizations. In order to fulfill their various information needs, the employees still require the consultation of several digital sources and tools (these include, for instance, electronic document management systems, commercial databases or generic search engines available on the Web). Consequently, the employees must deal with an impregnable technological tower of Babel where interfaces that present different languages, functionalities, 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 methods 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 social 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 navigation, etc.) and the other text-related practices (that comprise the sharing of texts and several individual and collective forms of writing such as annotation, extraction and content reuse). The contributed research poster will present preliminary results of a pilot project that took place within the Government of Canada. The research project aims to assess how document genres can be exploited in digital information system design and development. We seek to obtain a rich description of Canadian governmental employees' textual practices while they perform their everyday tasks. We also wish to evaluate the socio-cognitive impacts of document genres within these practices. The overall objective is the identification of textual and contextual cues that are important for the federal employees following their various work tasks. With these cues in mind, it then becomes possible to design solutions to improve the reading of digital content. Our approach to genre study - inspired by Systemic Semiotics (Clarke, 2000; 2001) - reveals a determination to bring together two theoretical standpoints, complementary but rarely exposed together. On one side, researchers adopt a social perspective to better comprehend how genre is formed while shaping communicational activities (following Bazerman's prominent approach). Researchers explore the normative principles inherent to specific genre use, such as business proposals (Lagerwerf, 2002), e-mail (Bergquist & Ljunberg, 1999; Orlikowski & Yates, 1994) and clinical records (Davidson, 2000). Even if this perspective highlights genre's social role in an organisational context, (like activity coordination between team members or implicit codification of behaviour rules in a community of practices), it does not reveal the more practical roles of genre in the digital content interaction that occurs during the communicational activities. More broadly, the reading activities and textual practices in organisational context have been overlooked in the different fields of research (except for Adler & al., 1998; O'Hara, 1996; Sellen & Harper, 2002). However, understanding how an employee interacts with a text to accomplish a work task is fundamental to identify the consequence of genre use for communication quality. The other group of genre studies adopts a cognitive perspective. These works aim to assess how genre's familiarity facilitates the comprehension of a digital text (Campbell & Toms, 1999; Dillon & Gushrowski, 2000; Dillon & McKnight, 1990). In effect, textual cues allow the users to obtain rich indications on the nature and content of a document, without need for a deep consultation. Nevertheless, these experiments are often realised in an artificial research setting where factitious textual practices are referred to users; this constitutes a serious limitation for those whom seek an understanding of the real needs that are emerging when a user interacts with text to effectively accomplish his work, and the proper evaluation of genre impact within that work. Spinuzzi (2003) underpins the importance of including user's work situations and tasks to demonstrate how genre can act as an effective tool to improve system design. Nonetheless, Spinuzzi's recommendations regarding how to include genre features in interface design remains unclear. Following Dillon's (2004) standpoint on the necessity to embrace the social and cognitive dimensions of the interactive process with digital text in a research agenda, we have elaborated a methodology that allows a better comprehension of this dual aspect of interaction. In order to better understand how the federal employees of Canada read, create, manipulate, use, and share texts within the various digital environments, six respondents were interviewed in a semi-constructed way. To complete these data, the same employees were asked to hold a diary to describe all the activities that brought them to interact with texts. A follow-up interview was also conducted to further develop important aspects of the diary. A third method of data collection, an open interview, was also applied to establish a list of textual and contextual elements that are important to perform reading and text-related practices. Based upon the results of the semi-constructed interview and the diary, the employees were asked to describe and demonstrate the aspects of texts and genres that are significant for their various work tasks. The expected contributions of the research project are the following: (1) an understanding of employee reading and textual behaviours at the Government of Canada, and the disparity of these behaviours following the various work tasks; (2) an evaluation of genre's roles while reading and performing the textual practices; (3) a practical representation of social, linguistic and technical genre features in use at the Government of Canada; (4) a list of influential textual and contextual cues for reading and information seeking, in association with their linkage to document genres. The preliminary findings demonstrate that understanding how genre impacts on reading in an organisational context leads to the development of more efficient information strategies to improve system design for work tasks. These strategies include genre exploitation within reading aids and the development of personalized options for content access. With this research, we wish to contribute to the enhancement of user access to digital text, where tools will be designed to support, in an integrated manner, the different kinds of reading strategies used to accomplish a diverse range of work tasks and activities. The authors will like to thank the following team members for their contribution to this research project: Pierrette Bergeron (École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l'information, Université de Montréal), Lorna Heaton (Département de communication, Université de Montréal), Philippe Langlais (Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle, Université de Montréal) and Stéphanie Pouchot (Université Claude Bernard - Lyon 1).

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