Hi everyone,

This is a reminder for our upcoming reading group session!

🔍 Topic: Incremental Formalization for Complex Knowledge Work
🎙 Speaker: Joel Chan
🗓 Date: Next Friday, January 23, 2026
⏰ Time: 12-1 pm EST / 9-10 am PST
📍 Zoom Link: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/87475130735
📅 Add to Google Calendar [link]

👩‍💻 Speaker Bio

Joel Chan is an Associate Professor in the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies (INFO) and Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL). His research and teaching work to enable a future where informed innovation is accessible to everyone, with a focus on human-centered design of novel information systems, such as search engines and knowledge management systems, in the domains of scientific discovery and design. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Project Scientist in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) at Carnegie Mellon University, and received his PhD in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh.

📝 Speaker Note
Formalisms and domain-specific languages like argumentation schemes are incredibly helpful for enabling computational support for knowledge work (this includes supporting collaboration between humans!). Alas, formalisms can also be devilishly tricky to integrate into creativity support systems: early stages of real, boundary-pushing knowledge work are often chaotic, fast-paced, and messy, and people often are quite (justifiably!) resistant to formalization. Without formalization, many tools have a persistent upper bound on how helpful they can be for extending the creative capacity of the user, which is usually fine if the user has very high amounts of uninterrupted cognitive capacity on tap AND the overall problem (and associated problem/solution spaces) can fit reasonably into that user's head. But this is... not always the case! How to deal with this impasse is a very old (as in from the 1980s!) problem in HCI. Fortunately, there's a general design principle to help! Incremental formalization! I'll lead some discussion and exploration of this design principle, including concrete examples of how it's working in my domain (scientific knowledge synthesis), and I hope to also get into what incremental formalization might look like in the age of highly capable AI agents. Reading the linked background papers is helpful but not necessary to productively participate in the discussion!

📖 Reading

• 📄 Shipman, F. M., & Marshall, C. C. (1999a). Formality Considered Harmful: Experiences, Emerging Themes, and Directions on the Use of Formal Representations in Interactive Systems. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 8(4), 333–352.

• 📄 Shipman, F. M., & Marshall, C. C. (1999b). Spatial Hypertext: An Alternative to Navigational and Semantic Links. ACM Computing Surveys, 31(4es), 14.

• 📄 Shipman, F. M., & McCall, R. (1994). Supporting Knowledge-Base Evolution with Incremental Formalization. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 285–291.

🧪 Additional examples

• 💻 Ink & Switch Potluck

• 📄 Van Kleek, M., Bernstein, M., Karger, D. R., & schraefel, mc. (2007). Gui—Phooey!: The Case for Text Input. Proceedings of the 20th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, 193–202.

• 📄 Applications in Joel’s work

⭐ Also of interest: CHI 2026 Workshop on Augmented Reading (STAR)

Are you interested in what the future holds for how we read? If you’re curious about how reading interfaces and AI might evolve, you may want to look at the upcoming CHI’26 workshop on the Science & Technology for Augmented Reading (STAR).

• 📝 Details and submission info: https://chi-star-workshop.github.io/

Looking forward to the discussion! Have a great weekend!

Best,
Sangho on behalf of the Dynamic Abstractions Team