AC review
score 2.5/5

  Expertise

    Expert

  Recommendation

    . . . Between possibly reject and neutral; 2.5

  1AC: The Meta-Review

    ==Post-PC Comments== 

    This paper was discussed among the reviewers and in the PC meeting. We
    all appreciate the rebuttal response and see great value in the authors'
    line of research. However, in the discussion we still found the framing
    with the two methods remains disparate, the relation between archetypes
    and findings are still not clear, and overall how much this work
    represents a significant contribution over past work was still
    questioned. As of now, it was decided that the paper needs revisions
    that would not fit within the CHI timetable. We sincerely hope to see
    this paper improved and published in another venue in the near future.

    ==

    First, I remind the authors that there is an opportunity for an optional
    5000 character rebuttal to address any misunderstanding or factual
    errors in the review(s). I emphasize to the authors that a strong
    rebuttal will be necessary due to a number issues brought up by the
    reviewers.

    Overall, reviewers found much to like about this paper. Compared to past
    work, it takes a more holistic approach (R1,R2). R1 notes the archetypes
    and the reportage of diverse strategies overall, despite their potential
    to be overly reductive, are done in a nuanced manner. R2 agrees that
    archetypes would be a useful contribution though disagrees whether the
    proposed archetypes are properly grounded in both the study's data and
    related work. R2 liked that the study uses mixed methods for "coverage
    and depth." R3 sees potential impact for PIM scholars in CHI.

    However, there are number of concerns shared by all reviewers (some of
    which arose during discussion between reviewers):

    o All reviewers had issues with the survey. Reviewers felt that the
    construction of the survey and its analysis was shallow and did not
    reveal insights that are markedly different from extant work. The fact
    that there is a difference between digital and physical management is
    not new (R2).

    R1 and R2 commented on the lack of focus and precision of terminology of
    the survey. R2 refers to a key omission that the authors ignore
    "archiving" which has become one of the predominant information
    management practices (particularly in cloud services). Moreover, both R1
    and R2 notes that what counts for "data" or "documents" is too
    broad---e.g., deleting friends vs emails doesn't seem equivalent.

    o Archetypes are not strongly tied to findings and, despite authors'
    qualifications, has potential to be abused. R3 has good suggestions on
    how to work around this issue. Authors should consider how to address
    this delicate balance between identifying patterns without
    oversimplifying in decluttering. Right now it veers towards the
    latter.

    o Lack of engagement with related work. R2 has provided an excellent
    list of significant omissions in cited work. I also would add that
    minimalists have been studied by Cheon and Su in HCI and CSCW, and, in
    particular, insights from ways they declutter (note: I don't expect the
    authors to have known about the recent 2018 CSCW paper).

    EunJeong Cheon and Norman Makoto Su. 2018. The Value of Empty Space for
    Design. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in
    Computing Systems (CHI ’18), 49:1–49:13.
    https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173623

    EunJeong Cheon and Norman Makoto Su. 2018. "Staged for Living":
    Negotiating Objects and Their Values over a Porous Boundary. Proc. ACM
    Hum.-Comput. Interact. 2, CSCW: 36:1–36:24.
    https://doi.org/10.1145/3274305

    It is important for the authors to include literature from related
    disciplines, not just CHI. We would be interested to hear where the
    authors seek to situate their work. For example, there are bodies of
    work that deal with professional practices curators, informal curation,
    minimalists, clutter, etc. The recommended papers by R2 cite work that
    can hopefully help the authors articulate their contribution to HCI more
    precisely. R2 says, "decluttering...seems strongly coupled with other
    organizational practices- filtering, sorting, organizing— which the
    cited literature details in depth. What new or unexpected findings
    resulted from this emphasis on decluttering?"

    o Overlapping with the above point, reviewers felt the work was
    undertheorized and too descriptive. The paper's contribution, due to
    past work, cannot rely on the latter. R3 suggests Mead's
    concept of mind that may prove useful if the authors decide to glom onto
    evolving identities.

    o Reviewers also commented on a lack of coherence and details with the
    research approach. R3 asks for motivation behind doing both survey and
    interviews and the relation between the two datasets--"Why talk to
    miniamlists at all?". The interviews are called "grounding interviews"
    but the surveys themselves seem to have been done independently ("in
    parallel"). R1 asks for better sign-posting/structuring of the paper's
    arguments. R3 finds introduction of the Vitale data set unmotivated and
    awkwardly placed. E.g., how are the three datasets synthesized to reach
    these archetypes?

    All reviewers wanted more details on methodology--why only 7 minimalists
    interviewed, why the skewed demographics? 

    o Some potential interesting discussions were disappointingly not followed
    up on in the paper:

    - Ideas on temporal visualization and prospective support (R1,R2)
    - Evolving identities (see above) (R3)
    - Comparison of digital with physical parallels (e.g., digital vs
      physical photos) (R1)

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2AC review
score 2.5/5

  Expertise

    Knowledgeable

  Recommendation

    . . . Between possibly reject and neutral; 2.5

  Review

    RESPONSE TO REBUTTAL

    I thank the authors for their thoughtful and ambitious rebuttal, I will be
    interested to hear the views of other members of the Program Committee.

    ORIGINAL REVIEW

    This submission offers an interesting way to think about digital clutter and
    physical clutter. While I have some suggestions for improvement, I think that this
    submission provides useful and intriguing perspectives, and should lead to
    interesting conversations at the CHI conference. However, there are gaps in what
    the submission provides (see reviews by R2 and R3), and those gaps should be
    addressed.

    The submission begins with a mixed-methods dataset, analyzed in considerable
    detail. It then moves to a set of user archetypes regarding patterns of saving or
    discarding digital data. Finally, the paper suggests interesting and in cases
    novel ideas for design.

    Strengths

    - For most Western readers, clutter is all around us, in our digital domains, and
    in our heads. The paper addresses a real set of issues.

    - The paper asks us to consider informants' diverse ways of thinking about their
    clutter, and educates us about a range of personalized perspectives.

    - I was initially resistant to strategies for decluttering, but the authors won me
    over. Their descriptions of strategies were detailed, and appeared to be grounded
    in the data. Part of my initial reluctance was that I was expecting a kind of
    totalizing catelog of strategies. However, what is offered is more modest than
    that, which is entirely appropriate given the limitations of the sample (the
    authors address these and other limitations quite nicely at the end of the
    submission).

    - I had a similar experience with the user archetypes. Initially, I expected
    rather grand and totalizing categories. I was pleasantly surprised to see a
    nuanced and modest account of several patterns. Of course, we might see different
    patterns across different cultures, and the authors do seem to agree about those
    kinds of limitations. The resulting set of culturally-anchored archetypes are used
    well as points-of-departure for new design concepts. That is a strength. However,
    as R3 notes, the use of archetypes remains problematic (see the beginning of this
    point), and I hope the authors can justify that approach.

    - I found the design ideas to be useful "tools to think with." While many of our
    digital artifacts have timestamps, this submission helped me to see how little we
    actually use those timestamps. I would be interested ot learn more about the
    authors ideas for timelines and temporal visualizations. I was intrigued by the
    authors ideas about prospective support, and I wished that they had told us more
    about this line of thinking.

    Weaknesses

    - I thought that the choice to interview seven "minimalists" should be better
    rationalized. Why not interview an equal number of minimalists and maximalists
    (should I say "hoarders"?)? The minimalist interviews pretty much push us toward
    one set of priorities. It would have been interesting to interview curators or
    collectors as well.

    - I thought that the longish paragraph about Participants provided too much
    detail, until I had to struggle to understand the major points. I suggest the use
    of a table instead of the text narration. I make the same suggestion about the
    list of questions in the Survey questions section.

    - Repeatedly, I had an uncomfortable feeling that I didn't know how the authors
    had chosen their scope. In the section about Survey questions, we read about
    "documents, photos, media files, texts, apps, bookmarks, contacts." I think there
    are many important distinctions among these artifacts. For example, media files
    vary hugely in size (e.g., a brief audio ring-tone vs. a full-length movie). The
    word "documents" similarly may cover a range of artifacts from grocery lists to
    novels. Finally, a "contact" is not so much an artifact, but rather a link to a
    person. Is the clutter the notation for the contact, or is the clutter s
    sociological issue of too many acquaintances? I wasn't sure, for example, how the
    submission would have described a dataset? Again, I feel the need for a rationale
    about how some classes of artifacts were included, while others were not.

    - I think there were many missed opportunities for direct comparisons. For
    example, if we are interested in how people manage their digital photos, then why
    not compare those practices with informants' practices around physical photos, or
    physical two-dimensional artwork? If we are interested in digital contacts, then
    it would make sense to engage people about how they manage their face-to-face
    friendships. And so on.

    - In other cases, I felt as if the digital description was not clearly
    differentiated from similar experiences with physical objects. Perhaps that was
    the point of those passages? I needed a better set of sign-posts or other
    guidance, about the goals of the accounts that the authors were building. I
    sometimes didn't know where we were going next in the analysis, and occasionally I
    wasn't sure where we had just been, so to speak. I think I am trying to ask for a
    stronger idea of the structure of the complex analyses here, and some more
    frequent indications of what the authors hope we have understood, and what they
    will be telling us next.

    - I sometimes needed more help to understand what is clearly a set of contrasts
    from the authors' perspective. The paragraph about mass decluttering involved the
    principle of "keep the best, delete the rest." Then this was somehow understood to
    be different from the following paragraph, which was labeled "Individual
    inspection." How can we keep the best without inspecting items? I could not tell
    why these categories are different.

    - I wasn't convinced about the never-ending-ness of digital decluttering. In the
    physical world, parents often feel that they are always re-ordering a room after
    their children have played. Out of doors, raking leaves can seem endless - as can
    harvesting fruit. The work to be done is replaced with new, similar work. (I wish
    I could remember where this story comes from. Somewhere, there is a folk-tale
    about a broom that falls apart while sweeping, thus generating a need for more
    sweeping. These problems of un-ending clutter have been with us for centuries.)
    Those descriptions seem very similar to the informants' descriptions of more
    images or other digital clutter arriving all the time.

    Summary

    I hope that the authors will address some of those questions in their rebuttal,
    and I look forward as well to the authors' responses to the comments of R2 and
    R3..

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reviewer 2 review
score 2.5/5

  Expertise

    Knowledgeable

  Recommendation

    . . . Between possibly reject and neutral; 2.5

  Review

    This paper presents a analysis of decluttering behavior, based on a online survey
    and interviews with minimalists. The proposed contributions of this work are a
    deep understanding of deleting decisions and a categorization of user archetypes
    based on synthesis of related literature.

    This goal of this paper is admirable, and it is great to see a mixed methods study
    to gain both coverage and depth. But the analysis of the data and synthesis of the
    literature are somewhat shallow and do little to engage with insights from prior
    work. A major question left after reading this paper is how is “decluttering”
    different from organization strategies studied in related literature?

    In particular, this work includes very little input from information science &
    digital curation. Although the paper claims only to synthesize work from the CHI
    community, it does include authors writing from contributing disciplines (like
    information science) and the work cited, such as Marshall and Whittaker, are
    highly informed by these perspectives.

    Some papers with relevant, important perspectives on the issue of digital clutter,
    deletion practices, and data curation are missing (see below). Relevant papers
    that are cited such as Sweeten et al(2018), Vitale et al(2018), Watkins et al
    (2015) contain important counter-perspectives on the issue of “decluttering” that
    are not addressed in the review or in the “synthesis” that the paper presents to
    create user archetypes

    1. Bannon, Liam J. 2006. “Forgetting as a Feature , Not a Bug : The Duality of
    Memory and Implications for Ubiquitous Computing.” CoDesign 2 (1): 3–15.
    doi:10.1080/15710880600608230

    2. Jasmine Jones and Mark S. Ackerman. 2016. Curating an Infinite Basement:
    Understanding How People Manage Collections of Sentimental Artifacts. In
    Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP
    '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 87-97. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2957276.2957316

    3. Marshall, C.C. Rethinking personal digital archiving, part 1: Four challenges
    from the field. D-Lib Magazine 14, 2008.

    4. Laurel Swan, Alex S. Taylor, and Richard Harper. 2008. Making place for clutter
    and other ideas of home. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 15, 2, Article 9 (July
    2008), 24 pages. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1375761.1375764

    5. Williams, P., Leighton John, J., & Rowland, I. (2009, July). The personal
    curation of digital objects: A lifecycle approach. In Aslib Proceedings (Vol. 61,
    No. 4, pp. 340-363). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

    Survey: 
    The survey questions ask users about keeping or deleting, but fail to consider
    deletion vs archiving (which can be operationalized for decluttering as hiding or
    file away data). This omission seems especially troublesome given that some
    platforms are intentionally designed for non-deletion information management
    practices (ie google docs), and using them in this way not all problematic. The
    omission of this type of decluttering affects the survey results. For example, the
    finding that "most people tend toward keeping" rather than deletion actually says
    nothing about decluttering, since ppl can enact preservation-based decluttering
    strategies with available tools.

    Results: 
    The takeaway from the survey is that there is a difference between digital and
    physical management practices, but this is already well known.

    One of the major findings is that deleting decisions can vary across data types
    and platforms. However, this finding is based on an odd conflation of all digital
    content as “data” For example, a Facebook friend is the same as a google doc in
    the analysis, but clearly, “decluttering” a social media profile is emotionally,
    socially, and informationally more complex that deleting old emails or google doc.

    Along with this conflation (perhaps as a result) decluttering habits and criteria
    are vague, which weakens this aspect of the paper’s contribution. The timing and
    strategies of decluttering don’t seem to feed strongly into the development of the
    archetypes. In addition, decluttering in these sections seems strongly coupled
    with other organizational practices- filtering, sorting, organizing— which the
    cited literature details in depth. What new or unexpected findings resulted from
    this emphasis on decluttering?

    The lack of diversity in the respondents and interviewees also raises questions
    about the generalizability of the user archetypes.

    Formatting: many of the references are incomplete

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reviewer 3 review
score 3/5

  Expertise

    Expert

  Recommendation

    Neutral: I am unable to argue for accepting or rejecting this paper; 3.0

  Review

    This paper makes several innovative design suggestions based on a plurality of
    ways in which paper declutter and keep their data. This is important for the CHI
    community as we know more about how people file and sort their information than
    how they "clean up." Their recommendations are based on the data that they
    acquired and analyzed (two studies but three datasets, as one was acquired from
    another researcher).  I can see this paper having an impact in the PIM subfield at
    CHI as a regular citation. That said, I have some concerns about the paper's
    theoretical and empirical basis that I hope they can address in rebuttal to make
    this paper a stronger contribution.

    My chief concern about this paper is that it is somewhat undertheorized.  This
    arises from being so deeply concerned with empirics, such as their attention to
    detail in terms of what people said and reported about what they do. This is
    valuable, but the notion that people not only keep but also actively discard
    tokens related to their relationships and past work is not particularly new. The
    finding that people use decluttering to tailor or as the authors put it, "evolve",
    their identities is an interesting one: it reminds us that "identity" is not
    static but performed, managed, tailored, and shifting over time. This paper
    reminds us that identity is done in concert with tools and objects, whether
    digital or physics, that are imbued with changing personal symbolic meaning, as
    well as people and relationships.  Some work on identity management in early
    symbolic interactionism -- Mead's concept of mind, *not* Goffman's performativity
    of the self  -- in terms of how identity is done in mirror or in relationship to
    others and to objects could be of help here.

    My second concern relates to the archetypes. I am really not a fan of using that
    word: it psychologizes activity in a dangerous way. My nightmare would be for
    someone at CHI to read this paper and then go around typologizing people as one or
    another type of declutterer. I appreciate that the authors say that people can use
    these different archetypes at different times and for different things. But
    reading this through, you could make the same points and avoid the archetype
    problem by describing these not as ideal types but as *approaches* to
    decluttering, ones that demand different interventions to support. Another option
    is to use active verbs to describe what people *do* when they declutter or don't,
    and their overarching goals or problems that need support. This can get us away
    from difficult talk of types and more toward activity and actionable design
    support. Or you could deploy grounded theory and not just identify themes in your
    data but elevate the terms that people *themselves* use to describe their own
    habits into analytical terms. Perhaps people do talk about being overwhelmed by
    their data and have a particular way of talking about that: in which case the
    authors should use those terms instead of coming up with a more distal category of
    their action and intentions.

    Finally, I have some questions about the datasets here, in particular their
    relationship to each other, their internal validity, and the provenance of
    analytical terms:

     - What is the relationship between the survey and the interviews? In other words,
    why talk to minimalists at all? Did this come from analyzing the survey data or
    some other reason? Is this a question of finding "extreme users" to inspire
    design?
     - Only seven interviewees were selected. Why this number, and when and why did
    you stop?
    - Your survey skews millennials and female. Were your findings different among
    less represented (here) groups like older men?
    - The Vitale data came from out of nowhere for me. You were describing two studies
    and then discussed another whole dataset entirely. Did you not have enough to go
    on in your own data to pick out these archetypes? Did you look for themes in the
    Vitale dataset that you had determined from your own studies, or just analyze it
    on its own terms? I'm asking, essentially, what if anything ties these datasets
    and investigations together.