Interacting with Digital Information

Every day, people from all kinds of professions and disciplines need to use information to make decisions, plan courses of action, discover patterns, solve problems, analyze situations, make sense of phenomena, learn new concepts, make forecasts about future trends, and so on. These are all activities that involve human cognition; in other words, they are cognitive activities. People whose professions involve the frequent or continual performance of cognitive activities include scientists, health-care specialists, medical researchers, librarians, journalists, learners, engineers, stock brokers, archeologists, educators, social scientists, and others—i.e., the so-called knowledge workers. As the amount and complexity of information is on the rise, computer tools are increasingly being used to support knowledge workers in their everyday cognitive activities. The component of these tools that allows knowledge workers to think and reason with information is their digital information interface, where information is displayed in a digital form such that it can be accessed and manipulated. Historically, we have been used to non-digital information that is displayed with static media. With the advent and proliferation of modern computers, however, we now have novel ways in which we can engage with information. Interaction with digital, electronic, computational tools can bring information to life and enable a human-information discourse. In order to perform cognitive activities effectively, we need to know the different forms in which information can be represented and displayed, as well as how we can interact with this information. Cognitive activities may take place in many different domains, including, among others, finance, medicine, insurance, healthcare, business, education, journalism, science, and engineering. The types of interactive computational tools that enable interaction with information to support cognitive activities have been referred to in various literature as decision support systems, educational and cognitive technologies, and digital library, problem solving, forecasting, analysis, planning, knowledge discovery, and sense making tools. This article is concerned with all such tools, in any domain, that enable, support, and enhance interaction with digital information for the purpose of carrying out cognitive activities.