Workspace 1.0

One mediated writing practice I'm keenly interested in is staging -- how and where we place the texts we think we'll need later or are placing around us in order to use at the moment.

Think about it; we've all got idiosyncratic practices of storing texts. There's the "Mad Filer" who saves everything on and off screen in hundreds of carefully labeled files. There's the "Chaos Theorist" who works best with papers scattered all around her and icons littering her screen. We might also characterize the "Mad Piler," "Post-It Note Boy," and "The Librarian" -- a book-based creature who can't possibly have read all those books that make his office seem so small (think your college English teacher).

No one has thought more about the role of the structure of one's workspace that Johndan Johnson-Eilola, now at Clarkson University. (Check out his site: http://www.clarkson.edu/~johndan/datacloud/)

Here are a few images from his own efforts to structure his information space:

• The Virtual, several screens: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johndan/1221383/ (looks like he could use one of these)
• The Real, several walls: http://people.clarkson.edu/~johndan/other/wall.html

Here's his own post "Computer Screens: More is More" in which contextualizes and points to those images: http://people.clarkson.edu/~johndan/datacloud/archives/001136.html

(Oh, and here's Thomas Jefferson arguing for an arrangement of his information space.)