Making It Real: Towards Practical Progress in the Management of Personal Information.

Discussion of a need for and potential of a study of human-information interaction is decades old. However, this discussion gains added impetus as computing technology and advances in HCI improve the transparency of access to information and "liberate" this information from dependency on a specific device for its persistence. But personal information is bound in other ways, most notably to a supporting application or service and in ways that resist liberation. This paper argues for a let-it-lie approach where a new class of applications might be "applied" to the information in situ through an API supported by its hosting application or service. The approach is illustrated through review of an itemMirror platform for the development of JavaScript web applications.