To start our project we first needed to get an overview of current literature about the topic, which we started over the course of last week.

Research Process:

To get a better understanding of the current state of research about affordances of digital documents and papers we wanted to concentrate our research on the following topics and questions:

• Affordances of paper
• Affordances of digital documents (+which digital media supports digital documents)
• Comparisons of using paper or different kinds of digital media to write/read

Using the papers, which were already handed to us in the description of our research topic, we utilized the snowball method in order to identify more papers related to our topic. Additionally we used the ACM Digital Library and Google Scholar to search for relevant literature. Detecting keywords for the search to get suitable results has proven to be a bit more difficult than expected. Using the keyword ‘affordance’ failed to bring us the results we were looking for. However, using more general terms like ‘paper’ or ‘digital documents’ left us with promising results. We gathered the found literature in a shared Zotero folder and documented which keywords were used and in which databases we had already looked in to keep an overview. While we still need to do more research on the topic, we want to present what we found so far in the following paragraphs. These are only our impressions from the first week of research and as mentioned above, we still feel like more research (with different databases and keywords) needs to be done in the following week to get a more complete overview of the literature.

Initial Findings and State of Research

• Quite a few papers investigate the growing number of features involved in working with digital documents. These date back to the early 2000s. Therefore, many of the features presented are standardized features right now. While they are important to understand the ways in which it is possible to interact with digital documents, we are not sure yet whether or not these would help with our project.
• Literature explaining more about the affordances of paper and why paper is still used in certain domains instead of switching to digital processes.
• Also comparisons of paper and the digital media is being discussed in current literature. While some research compares affordances of writing and reading, a bigger focus of research so far seems to have been on differences in reading on paper or digitally (especially books instead of paper in general). Often a clear separation of different digital media seems to be missing and research is focused on media at the time even though affordances differ a lot depending on the device used.
• While we weren’t specifically identifying it as a topic of research, we found that many papers deal with the combination of digital media and paper. This can either mean research on using paper as part of the user interface or research on ways to manage the usage of paper and digital documents at the same time. We think that the reasons why certain aspects of both media are being kept could help us understand the affordances of paper and digital documents better. We therefore, want to research this topic more.

Summary of Important Publications

Taipale, S. (2014). The affordances of reading/writing on paper and digitally in Finland. Telematics and Informatics, 31(4), 532-542.

Fortunati, L., & Vincent, J. (2014). Sociological insights on the comparison of writing/reading on paper with writing/reading digitally. Telematics and Informatics, 31(1), 39-51.

Taipale tries to find positive and negative affordances of writing/reading on paper/screen. Based on a previous study conducted in Italy Taipale replicated and adjusted the methods previously used to gain insight into perceived affordances of paper and computers according to college students in Finland, where digitalization is already more advanced. The goal was to identify different affordances and examine whether or not the cultural differences between countries in relation to the degree of digitization has an influence on the perceived affordances of digital media and paper. The study confirms the findings from Italy that suggest that positive affordances of writing (personality, flexibility) and reading (easier annotating, different postures) on paper outweighs the negative ones. The identified affordances are also quite similar to those found in the previous study from Italy. Paper as a medium is therefore, quite persistent and the study couldn’t prove that digital media enables richer communication than paper. Digital media has however affected the way students write (faster, more text) and read text and therefore, has its own affordances. The effect of digital media on writing also seems to be bigger than the effect on how students read text. It is concluded that the degree of digitization in a country has an influence on the perceived affordances of digital media and paper as the many ways to interact with digital documents are not used equally yet.

Takano, K., Shibata, H., & Omura, K. (2015, December). Effects of paper on cross-reference reading for multiple documents: Comparison of reading performances and processes between paper and computer displays. In Proceedings of the annual meeting of the australian special interest group for computer human interaction (pp. 497-505).

In their study Takano et al. compare the performance of cross-reading documents on paper and on a computer display when trying to detect mistakes in the text. Participants read faster and detected more mistakes when reading on paper. Based on these results they analyzed the way participants read on paper to use this information to improve digital reading. One thing they noted was that the possibility to move several documents at the same time and in different ways while reading on paper helped the participants. Participants also had the tendency to point at the paper while reading to keep track of where they are in the text. As a computer screen was used for this study the authors note that more research should be done on the topic using different media, e.g. a tablet where pointing at the document would be possible.

Schrock, A. R. (2015). Communicative affordances of mobile media: Portability, availability, locatability, and multimediality. International Journal of Communication, 9, 18.

Schrock identifies affordances of mobile technologies. While this research doesn’t primarily focus on affordances of media in relation to digital documents, this work still seems relevant for our project as we need to know the affordances of the media used for digital documents, many of which are mobile. The following affordances are identified: portability, availability, locatability, multimediality.

Ghosh, I., Chen, J., Ming, J., & Abouzied, A. (2015, May). The persistence of paper: a case study in microfinance from Ghana. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (pp. 1-10).

By using the example of a paper passbook Gosh et al. make a point in showing the importance of paper as a medium and argue that not all characteristics of paper can or should easily be transferred to a digital alternative. They note that careful consideration of the context is necessary when changing a process from paper based to digital media.

More Literature

Haber, J., Nacenta, M. A., & Carpendale, S. (2014, May). Paper vs. tablets: the effect of document media in co-located collaborative work. In Proceedings of the 2014 international working conference on advanced visual interfaces (pp. 89-96).

Conole, G., & Dyke, M. (2004). What are the affordances of information and communication technologies?.

Sellen, A. J., & Harper, R. H. (2003). The myth of the paperless office. MIT press.