Ayman Moghnieh

AmbientNEWS: Augmenting Information Discovery in Complex Settings through Aesthetic Design

Nowadays professional journalists create and edit broadcasting materials inside newsrooms that are characterized by an intense and multivariate flux of information. Within these settings, the journalists have difficulties keeping up with the evolving geopolitical picture of events developing in the world and how it relates to the topics of their interest. In this paper we present AmbientNEWS, an ambient display that visualizes dynamic news content and informs professional journalists on the global picture of events. We argue that the conceptualization and design of its information aesthetics criteria can be grounded in user requirements, and subsequently engaged to augment the awareness of professionals in an environment that is highly crowded with information. We also discuss the evaluation process of ambient information visualization with a focus on aesthetic design aspects. We conclude by summarizing our findings and discuss future work.

Supporting Distance Learning Activities and Social Interaction: A Case Study

The success of Web 2.0 technologies in providing support for social interaction in educational spaces depends on how learning environments benefit from the affordances of Web 2.0 services. These services can be combined with the management of learning activities as done by IMS Learning Design (IMS LD) compliant systems. In this paper, we analyze the ability of an integrated system (blog, forum, and IMS LD activities) to instigate and support learner activity and interaction with other members of the learning network. This analysis takes the form of a case study in which a small professional learning community uses the integrated system. Four different aspects are studied in this case: The role of the tutor, the role of socially outgoing learners, the influence of the adopted educational approach, and the systems components. The paper explains how each of these aspects can play a role in augmenting learner activity and interaction, and consequently incrementing the success of learning systems.

Interaction and Outcomes in Collaborative Storytelling Systems: a Framework, a Field Study, and a Model

In the last decades, advances in interactive information technologies have facilitated collaborative fiction writing, which has become widespread and large-scale. This paper proposes a framework to analyze collaborative storytelling systems, made of a set of parameters divided into six conceptual areas. Four of them relate to the systems and two (process and output) to the results of the collaboration. Through this framework we can study more precisely these different factors of the systems, their interplay, and how they impact the creators’ performance. We also present a controlled extended-duration field study on collaborative storytelling, and we use this framework to comparatively analyze these observations and other relevant experiences in the field of co-creation of shared narrative spaces. As a result, we propose a human-information interaction model for collaborative narrative systems, intended to better support co-creation and address the barriers of this kind of systems turning them into new opportunities for collaboration.

Modifying Entity Relationship Models for Collaborative Fiction Planning and its Impact on Potential Authors

We propose a modified Entity Relationship (E-R) model, traditionally used for software engineering, to structure, store and share plot data. The flexibility of E-R modelling has been demonstrated by its decades of usage in a wide variety of situations. The success of the E-R model suggests that it could be useful for collaborating fiction authors, adding a certain degree of computational power to their process. We changed the E-R model syntax to better suit the story plans, switching the emphasis from generic types to instanced story entities, but preserving relationships and attributes. We conducted a small-scale basic experiment to study the impact of using our modified E-R model on authors when understanding and contributing into a pre-existing fiction story plan. The results analysis revealed that the E-R model supports authors as effectively as written text in reading comprehension, memory, and contributing. In addition, the results show that, when combined together, the written text and the E-R model help participants achieve better comprehension--always within the frame of our experiment. We discuss potential applications of these findings.

Writing Consistent Stories based on Structured Multi-Authored Narrative Spaces

Multi-authoring is currently a common practice in the field of contemporary storytelling but producing consistent stories that share a common narrative space when multiple authors are involved is not a trivial task. Inconsistencies, which are not always well-received by readers are sometimes expensive to fix. In this work we attempt to improve the consistency of stories and narrative spaces by introducing a set of rules based on a formal model. Such a model takes into account the reader’s concept of consistency in storytelling, and acts as a framework for building tools to construct stories grounded in a common narrative space with a reinforced sense of consistency. We define a model (the Setting) and deploy it through a tool (CrossTale); both based on previous research, and discuss some user evaluation, with an in-depth analysis of the results and their implications.