Ravinder Chandhok

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.

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.

Distributed collaborative writing: a comparison of spoken and written modalities for reviewing and revising documents

Previous research indicates that voice annotation helps reviewers to express the more complex and social aspects of a collaborative writing task. Little direct evidence exists, however, about the effect of voice annotations on the writers who must use such annotations. To test the effect, we designed an interface intended to alleviate some of the problems associated with the voice modality and undertook a study with two goals: to compare the nature and quantity of voice and written comments, and to evaluate how writers responded to comments produced in each mode. Writers were paired with reviewers who made either written or spoken annotations from which the writers revised. The study provides direct evidence that the greater expressivity of the voice modality, which previous research suggested benefits reviewers, produces annotations that writers also find usable. Interactions of modality with the type of annotation suggest specific advantages of each mode for enhancing the processes of review and revision.

Envisioning communication: task-tailorable representations of communication in asynchronous work

~ls paper reports on our effofi to improve intefiws h asynchronous communication in which a group is communicating to solve a problem. We report restits ti an observational study and an experiment and use them as a basis for drawing design requiremen~ task-tiorable representations, emergent representations, emergent sharing, pubUc/private elements in a Iayouc increment form-o% and asynchronous awareness. We descrii an approach and proto@e that embodies some of the key requirements.

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>>

Interface issues in computer support for asynchronous communication

To everyones surprise, the most popular and extensively used feature of the Arpanet, begun in 1969 with funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency, was asynchronous communication [5]. Once the technology was available, people used it to exchange messages on a wide range of topics and to carry out work that used to be conducted with face-to-face meetings. Whereas the Arpanet was confined to a relatively small number of people at research universities and in government, similar trends are being observed in Internet usage [4]. People use network technologies to (try to) overcome time and space constraints. Of course, people communicated asynchronously long before computers. Compared to letter-writing, the medium has some obvious advantages—speed, automatic filing, ease of duplication and distribution—and disadvantages as well—as e-mail spamming has demonstrated. On the whole, any type of asynchronous communication will differ greatly from face-to-face communication. When people are dispersed in space and time, numerous aspects of communication are affected, including the sequencing of messages, the flow of communication, and the time required to complete a communication cycle (composing the message, editing, transmission, reception, feedback--acknowledgment of receipt--and reply). Numerous studies of asynchronous communication have been conducted (for an excellent review, see [6]). Most of the research has looked at the social-psychological effects of working face-to-face vs. communicating asynchronously. Our research extends and complements previous work by focusing on the effects that user interfaces can have on asynchronous work. After all, when people must work asynchronously, tools with effective interfaces can minimize the disadvantages and maximize the advantages of communicating across space and time. Our previous research focused on asynchronous communication in which the focus of the asynchronous communication was on improving an artifact [8, 9, 10] and examined the role of external representations in that process [11]. In that research, we hypothesized that different interfaces impose different information access costs and demonstrated that such differences significantly affect the amount and nature of communication [7,12]. This paper reports on our efforts to improve interfaces for asynchronous communication in which the communication is centered on a group communicating to solve a problem (but not necessarily to create an artifact). We have chosen to concentrate on how to represent the state of the task. Since one of the most basic properties of asynchronous communication is that the participants forget what is going on, groups working asynchronously must depend much more on external representations of situations and goals than they would in synchronous interaction. Thus, the design and maintenance of a task-specific representations is crucial.

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.

Ada edu project

The Ada programming language was designed to inherently support advanced software engineering. Thus, Ada is more than a language to the educator — Ada provides a framework in which to teach software engineering and computer science in ways not previously possible. However, most of the current emphasis in Ada development is involved with tools for the experienced programmer. These environments are usually too complex and bulky to be presented to novices in an early computer science course (based on the ACM CS1 curriculum). In addition, they usually require hardware that is too expensive to provide for large numbers of students. Therefore, in this paper we discuss a plan to construct an Ada environment for novices based on the MacGNOME environments already developed at Carnegie Mellon and being used on the Apple Macintosh. Through cooperation between the Software Engineering Institute, the Computer Science Department, Apple Computer, and Incremental Systems, Inc., we hope to put together a complete package including curricula, software (including support libraries), and a textbook to be used in teaching with Ada at the introductory level.

Annotations are not “for free”: The Need for Runtime Layer Support in Hypertext Engines

An important application of hypertext is the making and receiving of “annotations”—critical or explanatory notes added to a text. Rather than thinking of annotations as an application of hypertext systems, however, most hypertext system designers believe that hypertext systems are annotation systems; that is, they believe that annotations are “for free” in hypertext. After all, the reasoning runs, a hypertext system is, by definition, a system that allows users to create nodes and links between them; in particular, users can create text nodes and link those text nodes to nodes containing explanatory text; ergo, a hypertext system is an annotation system.