Comparative informatics

underserved users struggling to adapt to powerful but misaligned technologies. Understanding when difference matters for design (“the difference that makes a difference,” to use anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s useful phrase) is at the heart of CI. We believe CI should center on diligent, critical, empirical analysis—what we call grounded comparison. To illustrate grounded comparison, we present a study of regional styles in word processing and an ethnographic investigation of online work groups. Both examples indicate the breadth of methodological approaches appropriate to comparative analysis, which also encompass traditional laboratory studies [2].