A LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF AUTHORING USING NOTECARDS

ABSTRACT

Authoring is a general term that includes the tasks of collecting and organizing notes and ideas, documenting sources, and building information structures to produce a report, article, or book. The Xerox NoteCards system was designed to assist in the authoring process and to develop models of authoring. We employed a history graduate student to use the NoteCards system to write a research paper and studied him closely through observations, interviews, videotapes of his working sessions, and archived versions of his working files. Over a period of seven months he collected and organized his notes and ideas and wrote an outline and first draft of his paper using NoteCards.