Hao-wei Hsieh

Hypertext paths and the World-Wide Web: experiences with Walden's Paths

Walden’s Paths applies the concept of hypertextual paths to the World-Wide Web. Walden’s Paths is being developed for use in the K–12 school environment. The heterogeneity of the Web coupled with the desirability of supporting the teacher-student relationship make this an interesting and challenging project. We describe the Walden’s Paths implementation, discuss the elements that affected its design and architecture, and report on our experiences with the system in use.

Using paths in the classroom: experiences and adaptations

Walden’s Paths was designed to enable teachers to collect, organize, and annotate Web-based information for presentation to their students. Experiences with the use of Walden’s Paths in high-school classrooms have identified four needs/issues: (1) better support for the gradual authoring of paths by teachers, (2) support for student authoring of paths including the ability for students to collaborate on paths, (3) more obvious distinction between content of the original source materials and that added by the path author, and (4) support for maintaining paths over an evolving set of source documents. These observed needs have driven the development of new versions of Walden’s Paths. Additionally, the experiences with path authoring have led to a conceptualization of meta-documents, documents whose components include complete documents, as a general domain where issues of collaboration, intellectual property, and maintenance are decidedly different from traditional document publication.

Guided paths through web-based collections: design, experiences, and adaptations

Digital libraries need to facilitate the use of digital information in a variety of settings. One approach to making information useful is to enable its application to situations unanticipated by the original author. Waldens Paths is designed to enable authors to collect, organize, and annotate information from on-line collections for presentation to their readers. Experiences with the use of Waldens Paths in high-school classrooms have identified four needs/issues: (1) better support for the gradual authoring of paths by teachers, (2) support for student authoring of paths including the ability for students to collaborate on paths, (3) more obvious distinction between content of the original source materials and that added by the path author, and (4) support for maintaining paths over an evolving set of source documents. These observed needs have driven the development of new versions of Waldens Paths. Additionally, the experiences with path authoring have led to a conceptualization of metadocuments, documents whose components include complete documents, as a general domain where issues of collaboration, intellectual property, and maintenance are decidedly different from traditional document publication.

Navigable history: a reader's view of writer's time

Abstract Collecting, analyzing, and sharing information via a hypertext results in the continuous modification of information content over a long period of time. Such tasks will benefit from users having access to this authoring process. The Visual Knowledge Builder (VKB), a spatial hypertext system designed to support collaborative knowledge building, includes navigable history to provide readers a view of the writers time. VKB acts as a workspace for collecting, organizing, and interpreting information in a hierarchy of two-dimensional planes. During authoring, VKB records events in the hypertexts history and provides methods to access prior states of the hypertext. The reader may play forward or backward through the authoring process as well as search for a variety of authoring events on information objects. Users receive cues about the absolute and relative timelines of the information space through the presentation of information about specific events and their sequence. Examples of VKBs use include note taking, writing, organizing conferences, and sharing information in a research group. Analysis of VKB workspaces in these contexts indicates navigable history supports 1) learning and interpreting authors’ work practices, 2) recognizing patterns of activity in the information space, and 3) disambiguating specific actions and content. Hypertexts that include an authoring history add a notion of constructive time for their readers.

Supporting personal collections across digital libraries in spatial hypertext

Creating, maintaining, or using a digital library requires the manipulation of digital documents. Information workspaces provide a visual representation allowing users to collect, organize, annotate, and author information. The visual knowledge builder (VKB) helps users access, collect, annotate, and combine materials from digital libraries and other sources into a personal information workspace. VKB has been enhanced to include direct search interfaces for NSDL and Google. Users create a visualization of search results while selecting and organizing materials for their current activity. Additionally, metadata applicators have been added to VKB. This interface allows the rapid addition of metadata to documents and aids the user in the extraction of existing metadata for application to other documents. A study was performed to compare the selection and organization of documents in VKB to the commonly used tools of a Web browser and a word processor. This study shows the value of visual workspaces for such effort but points to the need for subdocument level objects, ephemeral visualizations, and support for moving from visual representations to metadata.

Visual and spatial communication and task organization using the visual knowledge builder

When people share a workspace, they naturally create visual structures which organize resources, communicate interpretations, and coordinate activities. To support this mode of communication and coordination we have built the Visual Knowledge Builder (VKB.) VKB supports the incremental visual interpretation of information. Through the emergence and evolution of visual languages, communication between VKB users sharing a workspace grows over time. VKB has been used for two years in note taking, writing, curriculum development, project management, and conference organization. These tasks include short-and long-term synchronous and asynchronous activities. Features such as the recognition of implicit spatial structure and navigable history facilitate the authoring and comprehension of shared visual information spaces. VKB has also been used in a more controlled setting by pairs of people writing a poem with a constrained vocabulary. This use of VKB has been compared to the same task using Magnetic Poetry sets to better understand how the characteristics of the tools and information space impact collaborative practice.

VITE: a visual interface supporting the direct manipulation of structured data using two-way mappings

Information processed by computers is frequently stored and organized for the computers, rather than for the users, convenience. For example, information stored in a database is normalized and indexed so computers can efficiently access, process, and retrieve it. However, it is not natural for people to manipulate such formal/prescriptive representations. Instead, people frequently sort items by rough notions of association or categorization. One natural organizational process has been found to center around manipulations of objects in spatial arrangements. Examples of this range from the organization of documents and other items on a regular office desktop to the use of 3″×5″ cards to organize a conference program. Using visual cues and spatial proximity, people change the categorizations of and relationships between objects. Without the help of indices or perfect memory people can still interpret, locate, and manipulate the information represented by the items and the higher-level visual structures they form. The VITE system presented here is an intuitive interface for people to manipulate information in their own way and at their own pace. VITE provides for configurable visualizations of structured data sets so users can design their own “perspectives” and a direct manipulation interface allowing editing of and manipulation on the structured data.

Manipulating structured information in a visual workspace

This paper describes the VITE system, a visual workspace that supports two-way mapping for projecting structured information to a two-dimensional workspace and updating the structured information based on user interactions in the workspace. This is related to information visualization, but reflecting visual edits in the structured data requires a two-way mapping from data to visualization and from visualization to data. VITE provides users with an interface for designing two-way mappings. Mappings are reusable on different datasets and may be switched within a task. An evaluation of VITE was conducted to study how people use two-way mapping and how two-way mapping can help in problem solving tasks. The results show that users could quickly design visual mappings to help their problem-solving tasks. Users developed more sophisticated strategies for visual problem-solving over time.

Effects of display configurations on document triage

Document triage is the practice of quickly determining the merit and disposition of relevant documents. This practice involves selection of documents from a document overview and quick forms of reading: skimming, reading short portions of a longer document, and navigating through headings, indices, and tables of contents. Earlier studies of document triage practice showed considerable overhead related to window management during transitions between the document overview and reading interfaces. This study examines the impact of multiple display configurations on document triage practice. In particular, it compares (1) configurations with same and different size displays, and (2) configurations with and without user control over which activity is performed on which display. Results show a significant increase in the number of transitions between activities when a multi-display configuration is introduced although there is no significant difference between the different multiple display configurations. Additionally, user activity with a document was positively correlated with an overall assessment of document value.

Patterns of reading and organizing information in document triage

People engaged in knowledge work must often rapidly identify valuable material from within large sets of potentially relevant documents. Document triage is a type of sensemaking task that involves skimming documents to get a sense of their content, evaluating documents to assess their worth in the context of the current activity, and organizing documents to prepare for their subsequent use and more in-depth reading. We have performed a study of document triage by collecting multiple forms of qualitative and quantitative data to characterize how 24 subjects read about a new topic and assessed and organized a set of 40 relevant Web documents. Our results indicate that there are multiple strategies for document triage, each involving different styles of reading, interacting, and organizing. Common strategies include: 1) focused reading early in the task, relegating the organizing until later in the process; 2) skimming performed in tandem with organizing, which relies on gaining an incremental understanding of the topic; and 3) metadata-based organizing, a strategy that stresses working with document surrogates to minimize the time spent reading. The findings suggest ways applications may better support the intertwined nature of the browsing, reading, and organizing activities in document triage.