[Sigia-l] IA and Prototype Theory

[Sarah Brodwall]

At Friday, 12/03/2004  17:48, Peter Merholz wrote:
>The IA community has in the past referenced George Lakoff's "Women, Fire, 
>And Dangerous Things," which address prototype theory.

Yeah, Lakoff is kind of my hero.  I love the way he applies cognitive 
linguistics to real-world stuff, for example 
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17574.  He's written lots of 
fascinating politically-oriented stuff for AlterNet.

> From "Writing as Design: Hypermedia and the Shape of Information Space", 
> by Andrew Dillon:
><URL: http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~adillon/publications/bromme.pdf >
>"The value of genre springs from very real cognitive processes. Genres 
>establish context for a reader with the result that anticipatory processes 
>prime the reader, enabling faster comprehension. Over lengthy documents 
>the genre can serve as a form of schematic representation or scaffold for 
>long-term memory. Indeed, there is evidence that such forms tie closely to 
>behavioral practices in a community (van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). Genre also 
>supports inference, allowing both readers to fill in gaps, and authors to 
>avoid stating every detail."

Aah...so this is like schemas in cognitive psychology!  I have never heard 
the term "genre" used in this way before, but it makes sense.  Thank you 
for bringing this to my attention, and thank you for the links--I look 
forward to reading those documents.  Maybe I'm a dork, too, but I also 
think this is really exciting stuff!

--
Sarah Brodwall                     Time you enjoy wasting is not
sjb at broadpark.no                   wasted time.    ~T. S. Eliot