Judith B. Strother - Information Overload: An International Challenge for Professional Engineers and Technical Communicators

IEEE Press

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IEEE Press Editorial Board 2012

John Anderson, Editor in Chief

Kenneth Moore, Director of IEEE Book and Information Services (BIS)

Books in the IEEE PCS

Professional Engineering Communication Series

Sponsored by IEEE Professional Communication Society

Series Editor: Traci Nathans-Kelly

This series from IEEE's Professional Communication Society addresses professional communication elements, techniques, concerns, and issues. Created for engineers, technicians, academic administration/faculty, students, and technical communicators in related industries, this series meets a need for a targeted set of materials that focus on very real, daily, on-site communication needs. Using examples and expertise gleaned from engineers and their colleagues, this series aims to produce practical resources for today's professionals and pre-professionals.

Information Overload: An International Challenge for Professional Engineers and Technical Communicators Judith B. Strother, Jan M. Ulijn, and Zohra Fazal (editors and authors)

Negotiating Cultural Encounters: Case Studies in Intercultural Engineering and Technical Communication Han Yu and Gerald Savage (editors and authors)

Forthcoming:

Slide Rules: Design, Build, and Archive Presentations in the Engineering and Technical Fields Traci Nathans-Kelly and Christine G. Nicometo (authors)

Communication Practices in Engineering, Manufacturing, and Research for Food, Drug, and Water Safety David Wright (editor and author)

Decisions: An Engineering and Executive Perspective Gerard Gus Gaynor (author)

Teaching and Training for Global Engineering: Perspectives on Culture and Communication Practices Kirk St. Amant and Madelyn Flammia (editors and authors)

International Virtual Teams: Engineering Successful Global Communication Pam Estes Brewer (author)

Cover image: Volodymyr Grinko/iStockphoto

Copyright 2012 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Information overload : an international challenge to professional engineers and technical communicators / [edited by] Judith B. Strother, Jan M. Ulijn, Zohra Fazal.

pages cm. (IEEE PCS professional engineering communication series ; 2)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-118-23013-8 (pbk.)

1. Information resources management. 2. Time management. I. Strother, Judith B. II. Ulijn, J. M. III. Fazal, Zohra.

T58.64.I5285 2012

658.4'038dc23

2012004721

This book is dedicated to our parentsto the memory of Judy Strother's parents, Thelma and Bailey Banks, and her stepmother, Grace Alexander Banks; Jan Ulijn's parents, Wim and Riek Ulijn-van den Oever; and Zohra Fazal's father, Muradali Fazal, and to the honor of her mother, Nasseem Fazal. We will be eternally grateful for their many contributions toward making us who we are today.

List of Practical Insights from Corporations

A2Z Global LLC

Alvogen

Applied Global Technologies (AGT)

The Dutch Employers' Association (AWVN)

College of Aeronautics, Florida Institute of Technology (Florida Tech)

Harris Corporation

IBM

Laboratory for Quality Software (LaQuSo)

Limburg Media Group (LMG)

Xerox

List of Figures

A multidisciplinary hierarchical view on human information.

Online, people may be using a subset or refinement of scanning and skimming skills that pose greater or different demands on the author.

Interrelated levels of culture.

Examples of cultural styles of discourse organization.

Graph design alternatives tested in study two.

Samples of restaurant and Web page menus.

Menu design alternatives tested.

Effects of added contrast and decorative features (action and emotion information) on viewer preference.

Effects of added contrast and color features (action and emotion information) on response accuracy.

Effects of added contrast and color features (action and emotion information) on response accuracy.

Excessive divisions in color coding.

Limited but intelligible divisions in color coding.

Preferred information choices.

Information choice trend.

Query elaboration as an ongoing conversation.

A second example of query elaboration.

Three-dimensional representation of an information need (white dot) among documents pertaining to it (black dots).

The interface for query tracking.

Part of a user's knowledge for the aircraft domain.

The retrieval stage for images.

The selection stage for images.

Coherence matching for a compound concept containing two subconcepts and a relation between them.

Fragment of a student XML data set.

Fragment of a student RDF data set.

SPARQL query to locate student names.

SPARQL query to find the names of students with known addresses.

SPARQL query to find people socially related to people known by A. Smyth.

A spam report for one e-mail.

The causes and symptoms of information overload.

A model for understanding the knowing-doing gap for using information visualization to reduce information overload.