ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses various sources of human factors data—each with its promises and problems: Third-party and historical sources; Debriefings of participants themselves; and Recordings of people's and process performance. Human factors, as a field of inquiry, often sits right at the center of an unfolding sequence of events. It is about how features of people's tools and tasks and working environment systematically influence human performance. Human factors are not just about humans, just like human error is not just about humans. Data about human error is infinite, and human will often have to reconstruct certain data from other data, cross-linking and bridging between different sources in order to arrive at what human want to know. In many domains the problem is compounded by the fact that recordings may not capture important automation-related traces—precisely the data of immediate importance to the problem-solving environment in which many people carry out their jobs.
