:MeetPi

One model for human/computer interaction I’ve been thinking about for some time involves the idea that the human mind is an integral but often ignored component of a computation triad made up of software. hardware and wetware. I’ve just started fiddling with TAMS Analyzer, an open source qualitiative coding program for the Mac and Linux.

Coding is the process by which you mark-up text with codes that represent information within text. It’s a way of essentially annotating text in a highly structured way so that themes and ideas in the text can be highlighted and analysed. The problem is, this task needs a wetware processor. Only a human being can read an email and extract the nuances from the text. It’s one of those tasks that computers absolutely suck at doing.

Here’s another example. MS Word is a sophisticated word processor, but without human input it won’t write anything. Again, it’s the wetware that adds a vital component – that of writing. So what? That’s all pretty obvious, I agree. But maybe if we start thinking of the human operator as an absolutely essential part of processing tasks instead of as a clunky meat-thing that’s prone to clicking the “wrong” buttons, we can design software that takes more thorough advantage of software, hardware and the incomparable processing capacity of the human brain.

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