Information consumption logs

Discussion questions for this thread and your midterm position papers:

What can we make of the quantification of reading:  the number of words consumed; the partition of the day into distinct modes of “information consumption”; the shrinking percentage of reading audiences?  What is the cultural and rhetorical function of these metrics?  Does your own quantification exercise – your information log – suggest that this is a meaningful methodological approach?  What does accounting both reveal and obscure?

More quantitative studies of “knowledge work”

In addition to the NEA studies about reading and the UC San Diego study of information consumption, we might consider some of the data from the study of academic performance by college students that I mentioned on Thursday:

Second there is the Academic Time Use Survey for College Students (more data on Bureau of Labor Statistics website):