Information Overload Research Group

Information Overload Resource Center
Articles, tools and research data about messaging overload and interruptions

Note

The Resource Center is definitely "under construction". In the meantime, you can let us know of any papers and resources that should be added; and you can add them yourselves to the FriendFeed room we use for collecting such pointers, at http://friendfeed.com/rooms/information-overload !

Contents

Research Papers on Email Overload

  • Begole, James "Bo", John Tang, Randall Smith, and Nicole Yankelovich, (2002) Work Rhythms: Analyzing Visualizations of Awareness Histories of Distributed Groups, Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work(CSCW 2002), New Orleans, LA, USA, Nov 16-20, 2002, ACM Press, NY, pp. 334-343. (ACM Digital Library) [http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=506443.506618]
  • Dabbish, Kraut, Fussell & Kiesler (2004): To reply or not to reply: Predicting action on an email message [1] a look at the decision making process once an email is looked at.
  • Horvitz, E., Jacobs, A., Hovel (1999). Attention-Sensitive Alerting, Proceedings of Conference on Uncertainty and Artificial Intelligence (UAI 1999), Morgan Kaufmann:San Francisco, pp. 305-313.[ http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz/priorities.pdf ] - Machine learning to triage email by urgency in Priorities system and then balancing costs and benefits of alerting with decision-theoretic model.
  • Horvitz, E., Koch, P., Kadie, and Jacobs, A. (2002). Coordinate: Probabilistic Forecasting of Presence and Availability. Proceedings of the Eighteenth Conference on Uncertainty and Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2002), Edmonton, Canada, July 2002, pp. 224-233. [ ftp://ftp.research.microsoft.com/pub/ejh/coordinate.pdf ] - Machine learning to forecast presence and availability, including time until next email review.
  • Jones, Q., Ravid, G., & Rafaeli, S. (2004). Information overload and the message dynamics of online interaction spaces: A theoretical model and empirical exploration. Information Systems Research, 15 (2), 194-210. [http://sheizaf.rafaeli.net/publications/JonesRavidRafaeliInformationOverloadISR.pdf]
  • Kalman, Y.M. and Rafaeli, S. (2005) Email Chronemics: Unobtrusive Profiling of Response Times, Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 38. pp. Ralph H. Sprague, (Ed.), p. 108. [http://sheizaf.rafaeli.net/publications/KalmanRafaeliChronemics2005Hicss38.pdf] - Analysis of the Enron email database uuncovvers response time patterns that corroborate the "24 hour expectation" conjecture: a message that is not replied to within 24 hours will very likely remian unanswered altogether.
  • Kalman, Y. M., Ravid, G., Raban, D. R., and Rafaeli, S. (2006). Pauses and response latencies: A chronemic analysis of asynchronous CMC. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(1), article 1. [http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue1/kalman.html]
  • Gonzalez, V. and Mark, G. (2004). “Constant, Constant, Multi-tasking Craziness”: Managing Multiple Working Spheres. Proceedings of ACM CHI’04, Vienna, Austria, April 26-29.
  • Mark, G., Gonzalez, V., and Harris, J. (2005). No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work. Proceedings of ACM CHI’05, Portland, OR, April 2-7.
  • Gonzalez, V. and Mark, G. (2005). Managing currents of work: Multi-tasking among multiple collaborations. Proceedings of the 8th European Conference of Computer-supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW’05), September 18-22, 2005, Paris, France.
  • Tyler, Joshua R. and John C. Tang, (2003) When Can I Expect an Email Response? A Study of Rhythms in Email Usage, Proceedings of the Eighth European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW) 2003, Helsinki, September 2003, pp. 239-258. [http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_people.nsf/pages/johntang.EmailRhythms.html/$FILE/ECSCWFinal.pdf]
  • Danyel Fisher; A.J. Brush; Eric Gleave; Marc A. Smith (2006). Revisiting Whittaker & Sidner’s “Email Overload” Ten Years Later. [[2]]

Research Papers on Distractions and Interruptions

  • Amabile, T., Hadley, C.N., and Kramer, S.J., (2002), "Creativity Under the Gun." Special Issue on The Innovative Enterprise: Turning Ideas into Profits. Harvard Business Review 80, no. 8 (August 2002): 52-61. - Field research that actually links interruptions and workplace pressure to reduced creativity.
  • Cutrell, E., Czerwinski, M. & Horvitz, E. (2001). Notification, Disruption and Memory: Effects of Messaging Interruptions on Memory and Performance. In Human-Computer Interaction--Interact '01, Hirose, M. (Ed.), IOS Press, pp.263-269. Copyright IFIP, 2001. [5]
  • Czerwinski, M., Cutrell, E. & Horvitz, E. (2000). Instant Messaging and Interruption: Influence of Task Type on Performance, In Paris, C., Ozkan, N., Howard, S. and Lu, S. (Ed's.), OZCHI 2000 Conference Proceedings, Sydney, Australia, Dec. 4-8, pp. 356-361.[6]
  • Czerwinski, M., Cutrell, E. & Horvitz, E. (2000). Instant Messaging: Effects of Relevance and Time, In S. Turner, P. Turner (Eds), People and Computers XIV: Proceedings of HCI 2000, Vol. 2, British Computer Society, p. 71-76. [7]
  • Czerwinski, M., Horvitz, E. & Wilhite, S. (2004). A Diary Study of Task Switching and Interruptions. In Proceedings of ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI 2004, p. 175-182. [8]
  • Horvitz, E., Apacible, J., and Koch, P. BusyBody: Creating and Fielding Personalized Models of the Cost of Interruption, Proceedings of CSCW, Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, ACM Press, November 2004. [ http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz/busybody_cscw.pdf ] -Bayesian models of the cost of interruption.
  • Matthews, T., Czerwinski, M., Robertson, G. & Tan, D. (2006). Clipping lists and change borders: Improving multitasking efficiency with peripheral information design. In Proceedings of ACM's CHI 2006, 989-998. [9]
  • Russell, Purvis and Banks (2007), Describing the strategies used for dealing with email interruptions according to different situational parameters, Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 23, Issue 4, July 2007, Pages 1820-1837 [10]
  • Sutherland, Ivan. Technology and Courage. An essay/talk by computing pioneer Ivan Sutherland that addresses how "courage" is necessary for us to work on the creative/hard projects rather than continually seek distractions so that we don't have to work on them. http://research.sun.com/techrep/Perspectives/smli_ps-1.pdf
  • S. T. Iqbal and E. Horvitz, Disruption and Recovery of Computing Tasks: Field Study, Analysis, and Directions, Proceedings of CHI 2007, San Jose, California, April 2007. [11]

Web Sites with Information Overload Resources

E-mail Related Social Issues

  • [12] - E-mania -- Ethical Approaches to E-mail Overload!
  • "Yours Truly," the E-Variations [[13]]
  • BlackBerry Orphans: The growing use of email gadgets is spawning a generation of resentful children. Katherine Rosman, Wall Street Journal 2006. A look at furtive thumb-typers, the signs of compulsive use and how kids are fighting back [14] and blogs about this article at [15]

This resource center is a growing work in process!