The law of the few refers to the following empirical phenomenon: in social groups a very small subset of individuals invests in collecting information while the rest of the group invests in forming connections with this select few. In many instances, there are no observable differences in characteristics between those who invest in information and those who invest in forming connections. This p...

As computing becomes increasingly mobile, the demand for information about the environment, or context, becomes of significant importance. Applications must adapt to the changing environment, however acquiring the necessary context information can be very expensive because collecting it usually requires communication among devices. We explore collecting reasonably accurate context information p...

As people become more and more involved with digital information, they grow proportionally involved in situated practices of collecting. They put together large sets of information elements. However, their attention to those information elements is limited. They use whatever means are at hand in order to form representations of their collections. They need to keep track of the elements in these...