Tuesday 8 April 2014

A mutual failure of discovery: DIB and DiCoT

Today, I have been doing literature searching for a paper on Distributed Cognition (DCog). By following a chain of references, I happened upon a paper on Determining Information Flow Breakdown (DIB). DIB is a method for applying the theory of DCog in a semi-structured way in complex settings. The example the authors use in the paper comes from healthcare.

The authors state that "distributed cognition is a theoretical approach without an accepted analytical method; there is no single 'correct way' of using it. [...] the DIB method is a practical application of the theory." At the time that work was published (2007), there were at least two other published methods for applying DCog: the Resources Model (2000) and DiCoT (Distributed Cognition for Teamwork; 2006). The developers of DIB were clearly unaware of this previous work. Conversely, it has taken me seven years from when the DIB paper was published to become aware of it and my team have been working on DCog in healthcare for most of that time. How could that happen?

I can think of several answers involving parallel universes, different literatures, too many different journals to keep track of, the fragility of search terms, needles in haystacks. You take your pick.

Whatever the answer actually is (and it's probably something to do with a needle in another universe), it's close to being anti-serendipity: a connection that is obvious and should have been expected. We clearly have some way to go in developing information discovery tools that work well.

No comments:

Post a Comment