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As I contemplated Karen's post, I 'got' something. It also
relates to the word 'distill' that has appeared in this
thread.
I think that the process Karen describes maps to the
metaphor of metabolizing protein. (This metaphor also
points to what it means for us to distill information.)
Our bodies take in proteins (we take in information) from
various sources. (Information from the programmer domain and
from the user domain with a smidgen from the grammar domain
in my case.)
Our bodies digest the proteins into constituent amino acids
(we break down the information we have acquired into its
constituent data).
Our bodies use the amino acids as the building blocks of our
own proteins (we reorganize and recombine the data in to new
forms, creating new information).
The breaking down (distilling, analyzing) is necessary because
data, like amino acids, are difficult to find and absorb in
their simplest forms.
Jim Shaeffer (jims -at- spsi -dot- com)
> Karen Casemier [mailto:karen -dot- casemier -at- provia -dot- com] wrote:
>
> No. I get paid to CREATE information that does not currently
> exist (and when I say doesn't exist, I mean it doesn't exist
> either in a file or in someone's head). That's the whole
> point - the developers can't offer much help in writing user
> documentation for two reasons:
> 1) Each developer only knows his specific piece of the
> software, and the majority know very little about how it
> relates to the entire program as a whole, and
> 2) Each developer knows the application from the back end -
> how the code works - not from the front end, how the end
> user is going to work with the software to complete his daily
> tasks.
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