Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Spinuzzi

I should remember this book but in case I blank, this is a reminder. He probably gives useful citations on ecology.

Clay Spinnuzi. Tracing Genres Through Organizations. MIT, 2003.

posted by jeremiah @ 6:55 AM 

1 Comments:

Blogger jeremiah said...

Here's one of Spinuzzi's quick and dirty takes on "genre ecologies":

http://wac.colostate.edu/books/selves_societies/spinuzzi/

Upshot seems to be the following:

"To discuss how such groups of artifacts mediate activities, I turn to Edwin Hutchins' 'ecologies of tools.' Hutchins found that the many artifacts used on a naval vessel (such as astrolabes, compasses, sextants, and calculators) are arrayed and employed by multiple workers to transform data. He sees these transformations as part of a computation in which 'each tool creates the environment of the others' (p.114). There tools are connected in multiple, complex, and often nonsequential ways. Furthermore, they co-evolve: changes in one lead to changes in others. For instance, functions sometimes move around from astrolabe to quadrant to cross staff to sextant (p.113-114); such movement is made possible by the tools' interconnections in the ecology. The ecology itself — not its individual tools — is the mediator of the activity.

The genre ecology framework is based on this notion of tool ecologies. But rather than focusing on the functional aspects of tools, it focuses on the interpretive aspects of genres of tools, i.e., artifact types that are cyclically developed and interpreted in ongoing activities. In any given activity system, artifacts become familiar to workers over time, so much so that workers begin to interpret artifacts as instantiations of genres. These genres of artifacts collectively mediate the workers' activities, and in doing so they become interconnected with each other in mediational relationships. Such interconnected genres can be considered genre ecologies (Spinuzzi, 2002b; Spinuzzi & Zachry, 2000; Zachry, 1999)."

10:47 AM  

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