Dr. Andrew Dillon was awarded the 1998 Steven I. Goldspiel Memorial Research Grant. The title of his proposal is "Understanding Users in Digital Environments: A Longitudinal Study of Genre Influences in Information Work." The primary objective of the project is to demonstrate how digital genres are formed in the minds of users and how such genres impact both the users' capabilities to utilize the digital resources and their ratings of such resources' usefulness. Genres are natural psychological occurrences, in which the cognitive system abstracts, patterns and automates activities so as to free up limited attentional resources. As with newspapers, where readers have learned to recognize purposes of a newspaper article based on its layout and sequencing in the paper, the same types of patterns may evolve for digital documents. In this study, users of digital resources will be tracked over a nine-month period to determine whether interaction patterns develop. The report is scheduled to be completed in 2000.
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