Haowei Hsieh

Supporting document triage via annotation-based multi-application visualizations

For open-ended information tasks, users must sift through many potentially relevant documents, a practice we refer to as document triage. Normally, people perform triage using multiple applications in concert: a search engine interface presents lists of potentially relevant documents; a document reader displays their contents; and a third tool--a text editor or personal information management application--is used to record notes and assessments. To support document triage, we have developed an extensible multi-application architecture that initially includes an information workspace and a document reader. An Interest Profile Manager infers users interests from their interactions with the triage applications, coupled with the characteristics of the documents they are interacting with. The resulting interest profile is used to generate visualizations that direct users attention to documents or parts of documents that match their inferred interests. The novelty of our approach lies in the aggregation of activity records across applications to generate fine-grained models of user interest.

Supporting document triage via annotation‐based visualizations

For open-ended information tasks, users must determine how to best use their time in sifting through many potentially relevant documents. Document triage is the process of rapidly assessing the potential value of documents with respect to the task at hand. Normally, people perform triage using multiple applications in concert: a search engine interface presents lists of potentially relevant documents; a document reader displays their contents; and a third tool—a text editor or a more specialized application—is used to record notes and assessments. To support document triage, we have developed a multi-application environment that combines an information workspace with a modified document reader. This environment infers users interests based on their interactions with both applications, coupled with an analysis of the characteristics and content of the documents they are interacting with. It then uses this interest profile to generate visualizations that bring users attention to documents or parts of documents that match those inferred interests.

Digital library 2.0 for educational resources

We report on focus group feedback regarding the services provided by existing education-related Digital Libraries (DL). Participants provided insight into how they seek educational resources online, and what they perceive to be the shortcomings of existing educational DLs. Along with useful content, social interactions were viewed as important supplements for educational DLs. Such interactions lead to both an online community and new forms of content such as reviews and ratings. Based on our analysis of the focus group feedback, we propose DL 2.0, the next generation of digital library, which integrates social knowledge with DL content.

Facilitating content creation and content research in building the city of lit digital library

In conjunction with Iowa Citys designation as a UNESCO City of Literature, an interdisciplinary research team at The University of Iowa collaborated to develop a digital library featuring important Iowa City authors and locations. The City of Lit digital library consists of a mobile application for the general public and a set of web-based interfaces for researchers and content creators. This paper explains the motivation and describes the design and implementation of the digital library, its framework, the user-side mobile app and our future plans. We also outline a pilot study, in which undergraduate students conducted scholarly research and created content for the digital collection.

Categorization of computing education resources with utilization of crowdsourcing

The Ensemble Portal harvests resources from multiple heterogeneous federated collections. Managing these dynamically increasing collections requires an automatic mechanism to categorize records in to corresponding topics. We propose an approach to use existing ACM DL metadata to build classifiers for harvested resources in the Ensemble project. We also present our experience with utilizing the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform to build ground truth training data sets from Ensemble collections.

The "City of Lit" digital library: a case study of interdisciplinary research and collaboration

In 2008, Iowa City was designated as one of only fiveCities of Literature worldwide by UNESCO. To take advantage of our rich local literary history, an interdisciplinary research team from the University of Iowa collaborated to develop a digital library featuring Iowa City authors and locations. The UNESCO City of Literature digital library (referred to internally as City of Lit) consists of a mobile application for the general public to access the database and a set of web-based interfaces for researcher and content creators to contribute to the database. Members of the research team have developed undergraduate literature courses to study the feasibility of using young scholars for digital content creation, and the pedagogical effect of including digital research in traditional literary courses. Students in the courses were trained to conduct scholarly research and generate a variety of digital resources to be included in the digital collection. This paper reports our experience building the City of Lit digital library and the results from evaluations and studies of the students in the courses. We also outline the implementation and development of the digital library, its framework, and the client-side mobile application.

Undergraduate Peer Learning and Public Digital Humanities Research

In conjunction with Iowa Citys 2008 designation as a UNESCO City of Literature, an interdisciplinary team of University of Iowa faculty, graduate and undergraduate student researchers formed UCOL – the University of Iowa UNESCO City of Literature Mobile Application Development Team. The project brings together community partners, faculty, students and staff at the university to develop, record and produce multimedia research about local writers for ‘City of Lit’, a mobile app now available for mobile devices. During the past year, the project was incorporated into three sections of a general education literature course, giving undergraduate students experience conducting research and creating multimedia content on local authors. Students in this class worked collectively to create multimedia hypertext documents that feature traditional text, photos, graphics, and audio and video content for inclusion in the mobile app. The project encouraged interdisciplinary collaborative undergraduate research. Student reflections and presentations, along with a formal survey designed by the research team, suggest that the project provided valuable learning outcomes through its integration of literary research and analysis, New Media and technology, and local community engagement within team-based learning. The authors research indicates that the creation of peer-assisted scholarship positively facilitated the peer learning process, particularly with groups of three students.

The Iowa City UNESCO City of literature digital library

Iowa City is one of only four designated Cities of Literature worldwide by UNESCO. To highlight the citys rich local literary history, a University of Iowa interdisciplinary research team de-veloped a digital library featuring Iowa City authors and locations. The Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature City of Lit digital library consists of a mobile application for the general public and a web-based information system for researcher/content creators.

Assisting two-way mapping generation in hypermedia workspace

This paper reports our study of a two-way mapping generation tool called Mapping Assistant, as an extension to the Spatial Hypermedia system VITE. Mapping Assistant has been designed to overcome the problem arising due to the difficulty of users in generating an initial two-way mapping for VITE. We have developed VITE to allow users to interact with information in a semi-formal workspace. Creating two-way mapping profiles is a vital step for projecting structured information into a spatial hypermedia system. A previous study of VITE indicated that users spent much of their time developing an initial mapping before working on the information task. We designed the Mapping Assistant to assist users by generating a quick initial mapping from the data entered by the user and reduce the cognitive and mental load on the user. This research studies users impression of the Mapping Assistant. The results indicate that the users liked the Mapping Assistant and found it useful, but comments from users also reveal possible directions for further improvement of the tool and its design.

The nuestra Iowa project: creating a digital collection as a tool for history education

This poster describes the progress of a research project exploring how public digital publishing affects undergraduate research and learning. Participants are students in Latina/o Immigration, an undergraduate-level history course at the University of Iowa. Students use a custom web interface to create a digital exhibit about the history of Latino/as in Iowa, using multimedia primary-source materials from the Iowa Womens Archives (IWA). Students also use the tool to learn the concepts related to metadata and digital libraries.