David S. Kaufer

Issues in the design of computer support for co-authoring and commenting

This paper reports on a project to develop a “work in preparation” editor, or PREP editor, to study co-authoring and commenting relationships. As part of the project, we have identified three issues in designing computer support for co-authoring and commenting: (1) support for social interaction among co-authors and commenters; (2) support for cognitive aspects of co-authoring and external commenting; and (3) support for practicality in both types of interaction. For each of these issues, the paper describes the approach the PREP editor takes to address them.

Flexible Diff-ing in a collaborative writing system

An important activity in collaborative writing is communicating about changes to texts,, This paper reports on a software system, ji’exible cliff, that finds and reports differences (“cliffs”) between versions of texts. The system is flexible, allowing users to control several aspects of its operation including what changes are reported and how they are shown when they are reported. We argue that such flexibility is necessary to support users’ different social and cognitive needs.

Communication at a distance : the influence of print on sociocultural organization and change

This book bridges an important gap between two major approaches to mass communication -- historical and social scientific. To do so, it employs a theory of communication that unifies social, cultural and technological concerns into a systematic and formal framework that is then used to examine the impact of print within the larger socio-cultural context and across multiple historical contexts. The authors integrate historical studies and more abstract formal representations, achieving a set of logically coherent and well-delimited hypotheses that invite further exploration, both historically and experimentally. A second gap that the book addresses is in the area of formal models of communication and diffusion. Such models typically assume a homogeneous population and a communication whose message is abstracted from the complexities of language processing. In contrast, the model presented in this book treats the population as heterogeneous and communications as potentially variable in their content as they move across speakers or readers. Written to address and overcome many of the disciplinary divisions that have prevented the study of print from being approached from the perspective of a unified theory, this book employs a focused interdisciplinary position that encompasses several domains. It shows the underlying compatibility between cognitive and social theory; between the study of language and cognition and the study of technology; between the postmodern interest in the instability of meaning and the social science interest in the diffusion of information; between the effects of technology and issues of cultural homogeneity and heterogeneity. Overall, this book reveals how small, relatively non-interactive, disciplinary-specific conversations about print are usefully conceived of as part of a larger interdisciplinary inquiry.

Computer support for distributed collaborative writing: defining parameters of interaction

This paper reports research to define a set of interaction parameters that collaborative writers will find useful. Our approach is to provide parameters of interaction and to locate the decision of how to set the parameters with the users. What is new in this paper is the progress we have made outlining task management parameters, notification, scenarios of use, as well as some implementation architectures.

The Notes program: a hypertext application for writing from source texts

Notes is a hypertext application developed to investigate the effects of computers on the writing process, in particular, on the processes of acquiring and structuring knowledge when writing from source texts. Notes is designed to help writers record their own ideas (e.g., reactions, inferences, plausibility assessments), recover the context for those ideas easily and view ideas from multiple perspectives. In this paper we outline the theoretical basis for the design of the Notes program. Then we briefly describe the program itself and its relation to relevant research. Finally we describe our experience with users.

A visual design for collaborative work: columns for commenting and annotation

Collaboration has traditionally occurred through verbal and visual communication. In recent years, technical innovation has provided a new context for collective efforts that are supported by the computer. Yet little attention has been paid to the traditional visual designs that have supported collaboration in the past. The paper describes a visually oriented design for accessing and organizing information in the context of computer supported collaborative work. The authors show how interface design with a strong emphasis on a simple yet elegant visual metaphor can facilitate collaboration by reducing clutter and focusing end-user tasks efficiently. A columnar visual interface provides a powerful interaction mechanism for supporting collaboration in general.<<ETX>>

Accommodating mixed sensory/modal preferences in collaborative writing systems

Writers use the abstractions of words to create meaning. But the activity of writing spans multiple concrete senses and modes. Technology-enhanced collaborative writing systems need to be sensitive to the preferred senses and modes of information in which writing teams want to work. Some preferences seem rooted in the senses (seeing vs. motor coordination); others seem based in the preferred modality of inputting or outputting information (speaking vs. writing; listening vs. reading). Still others seem based in the role of the writer on the team (author or commenter). We offer a framework for understanding some of these preferences and a prototype editor (the Prep Editor) we have been using to study them empirically.