Situation versus Context
Well, I've been wondering about this recently....how situation and context relate...and this paper: Situatedness: The Interplay between Situation and Context, comes up with a possible answer. Here they argue that situation sits with context. Funnily enough when I thought about it I saw it as the other way around. Probably inspired by Dourish I had thought that since context was something that was agreed between the agents involved, and that the situation was something larger that involved all kinds of other things like the backgrounds of the agents, their experiences, their relationship to one another etc... Maybe the terms are interchangeable but do describe two different things? Or maybe I am thinking of "situated" and therefore the situatedness they mention in the title!
Here is their definition/explanation:
"A situation consists of the spatiotemporal ordering of objects and agents alongside physically given constraints or characteristics like gravitational force or light intensity. Of interest to an agent2 are the stimuli that it can perceive with its sensors. In our view, situatedness refers to specific situations in which actions take place. Actions are understood here not only as task oriented behaviour but in a broader sense (cf. Clancey, 2002). In contrast to situation, context is a general construct that depends on various factors and is definable on at least two different levels. On the one hand, there are socio-cultural (global) contexts such as language. On the other hand, smaller (local) contexts can also be found, e.g., the context of a seminar. The actions of an individual, from now on called an agent, are constrained by this context. A student at a seminar has to act according to her role as a student, i.e. she has to be attentive, ask smart questions, and discuss the topic of the seminar. Dancing, singing, or swearing is not expected from her as it is not licensed by the seminar context. In this sense, a context supplies certain patterns of behaviour and of analysis for situations an agent can be confronted with. A provision of this kind is exemplified in section 5. A situation is thus embedded in a certain context. This context influences or determines a situation and its analysis by the agent. In a
given situation, there is not a single context but a great number of different, possibly overlapping contexts. In order to analyze whether something is context sensitive or situated, it is necessary to look at the specific situation and figure out which contexts are present and which role the agent plays in each of them".