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 | Plans and Situated Actions : The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive & Computational Perspectives) |
 | "A classic work on the application of social science to HCI" | 2006-05-10 |
This book is not for everyone. Suchman makes connections between AI, HCI and the sociological areas of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM/CA) - connections that have been very visible and influential in subsequent HCI and CSCW research. If you don't have any background in these sociological areas, it will take some work to read it.
That said, I think this book is reasonably accessible, and certainly more so than has been suggested by some reviewers. Suchman was writing to counter a prevalent mindset in the AI community of the time. Basically, Chapters 2 and 3 set up a technical and philosophical strawman (human action as the execution of plans), Chapters 4 and 5 provide an explanation of some necessary theoretical background, and the rest is an analysis of interaction in the context of these theories that serves to knock down the strawman. It's fairly hard to have a more clear and logical organization than that. There's no part of that organization that could be left out and still have the book make sense.
Furthermore, by comparison, the theoretical parts of this book should be easier for the uninitiated to read than are Garfinkel's writings on ethnomethodology (or most CA writings by almost anyone). They may or may not do justice to those ideas, but that's a separate question. And for someone with any background at all in these areas (though as suggested by other reviewers, this does not include a huge number of people), this book should be a very straightforward read.
The bottom line for me is that this book (like Paul Dourish's "Where the Action Is") is an interdisciplinary gem that has the potential to change how you think about how people approach technology. There aren't that many books for which that can be said.
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 | Omnipage Pro 12 Upgrade |
 | "not clear it's worth the upgrade from 11" | 2003-08-27 |
I like the new batch mechanism, which has an "output file per input file" option. I haven't particularly noticed a stability problem (Win2K SP4 + OP12 SP1/2). However, the deal with the PDFs is this: when OP12 reads an image PDF, it will only save such PDFs as grayscale (if you ask for image/image+text), and OP12 can only save grayscale/color PDFs at 150dpi. Hence, if you have bi-level input PDFs at >150dpi resolution, you get enormous, ugly 150dpi grayscale output PDFs. On the other hand, OP12 can handle high resolution TIFFs just fine (i.e., it will save them as image/image+text PDFs with the correct resolution). This makes absolutely no sense and is a big step backward from OP11. As the other reviewer notes, they appear not to have any intention of fixing this in OP12.
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