Yin Qu

Using Metrics of Curation to Evaluate Information-Based Ideation

Evaluating creativity support environments is challenging. Some approaches address people’s experiences of creativity. The present method measures creativity, across conditions, in the products that people make. This research introduces information-based ideation (IBI), a paradigm for investigating open-ended tasks and activities in which users develop new ideas. IBI tasks span imagining, planning, and reflecting on a weekend, vacation, outfit, makeover, paper, internship, thesis, design, campaign, crisis response, career, or invention. What products do people create through engagement in IBI? Curation of digital media incorporates conceptualization, finding and choosing information objects, annotation, and synthesis. Through engagement in IBI tasks, people create curation products. This article formulates a quantitative methodology for evaluating IBI support tools, building on prior creative cognition research in engineering design to derive a battery of ideation metrics of curation. Elemental ideation metrics evaluate creativity within curated found objects. Holistic ideation metrics evaluate how a curation puts elements together. IBI support environments are characterized by their underlying medium of curation. Curation media include lists, such as listicles, and grids, such as the boards of Pinterest. An in-depth case study investigates information composition, an art-based medium representing a curation as a freeform visual semantic connected whole. We raise two creative cognition challenges for IBI. One challenge is overcoming fixation—for instance, when a person gets stuck in a counterproductive mental set. The other challenge is to bridge information visualization’s synthesis gap, by providing support for connecting findings. To address the challenges, we develop mixed-initiative information composition (MI2C), integrating human curation of information composition with automated agents of information retrieval and visualization. We hypothesize that MI2C generates provocative stimuli that help users overcome fixation to become more creative on IBI tasks. We hypothesize that MI2C’s integration of curation and visualization bridges the synthesis gap to help users become more creative. To investigate these hypotheses, we apply ideation metrics of curation to interpret results from experiments with 44 and 49 participants.

Promoting reflection and interpretation in education: curating rich bookmarks as information composition

Reflection, interpretation, and curation play key roles in learning, creativity, and problem solving. Reflection means looking back and forward among building blocks constituting a space of ideas, contextualizing with processes including tasks, activities, and ones internal thinking and meditating, and deriving new understandings, known as interpretations. Curation, in the digital age, means searching, gathering, collecting, organizing, designing, reflecting on, and interpreting information. We introduce rich bookmarks, representations of key ideas from documents as navigable links that integrate visual clippings and rich semantic metadata. We support curating rich bookmarks as information composition. In this holistic visual form, curators express relationships among curated elements through implicit visual features, such as spatial position, color, and translucence. We investigated the situated context of a university course, engaging educators in iterative co-design. Rich bookmarks emerged in the process, motivating changes in pedagogy and software. Changes provoked students to collect more novel and varied ideas. They reported that curating rich bookmarks as information composition helped them reflect, transforming prior ideas into new ones. The visual component of rich bookmarks was found to support multiple interpretations; the semantic to support associational exploration of related ideas.

Meta-metadata: a metadata semantics language for collection representation applications

Collecting, organizing, and thinking about diverse information resources is the keystone of meaningful digital information experiences, from research to education to leisure. Metadata semantics are crucial for organizing collections, yet their structural diversity exacerbates problems of obtaining and manipulating them, strewing end users and application developers amidst the shadows of a proverbial tower of Babel. We introduce meta-metadata, a language and software architecture addressing a metadata semantics lifecycle: (1) data structures for representation of metadata in programs; (2) metadata extraction from information resources; (3) semantic actions that connect metadata to collection representation applications; and (4) rules for presentation to users. The language enables power users to author metadata semantics wrappers that generalize template-based information sources. The architecture supports development of independent collection representation applications that reuse wrappers. The initial meta-metadata repository of information source wrappers includes Google, Flickr, Yahoo, IMDb, Wikipedia, and the ACM Portal. Case studies validate the approach.

Beyond Slideware: How a Free-form Presentation Medium Stimulates Free-form Thinking in the Classroom

We investigate how presentation in a free-form medium stimulates free-form thinking and discussion in the classroom. Most classroom presentations utilize slideware (e.g. PowerPoint). Yet, slides add intrusive segregations that obstruct the flow of information. In contrast, in a free-form medium of presentation, content is not separated into rigid slide compartments. Instead, it is visually arranged and transformed in a continuous space. We develop a case study that investigates student experiences authoring, presenting, viewing, and discussing free-form presentations in a graduate seminar class. We analyze interviews, present a sampling of student presentations, and develop findings: free-form presentation stimulates free-form thinking, spontaneous discussion, and emergent ideation.

Metadata type system: integrate presentation, data models and extraction to enable exploratory browsing interfaces

Exploratory browsing involves encountering new information during open-ended tasks. Disorientation and digression are problems that arise, as the user repeatedly loses context while clicking hyperlinks. To maintain context, exploratory browsing interfaces must present multiple web pages at once. Design of exploratory browsing interfaces must address the limits of display and human working memory. Our approach is based on expandable metadata summaries. Prior semantic web exploration tools represent documents as metadata, but often depend on semantic web formats and datasets assembled in advance. They do not support dynamically encountered information from popular web sites. Optimizing presentation of metadata summaries for particular types of documents is important as a further means for reducing the cognitive load of rapidly browsing across many documents. To address these issues, we develop a metadata type system as the basis for building exploratory browsing interfaces that maintain context. The type system leverages constructs from object-oriented programming languages. We integrate data models, extraction rules, and presentation semantics in types to operationalize type specific dynamic metadata extraction and rich presentation. Using the type system, we built the Metadata In-Context Expander (MICE) interface as a proof of concept. A study, in which students engaged in exploring prior work, showed that MICEs metadata summaries help users maintain context during exploratory browsing. \

Evaluating TweetBubble with Ideation Metrics of Exploratory Browsing

We extend the Twitter interface to stimulate exploratory browsing of social media and develop a creative cognition method to establish its efficacy. Exploratory browsing is a creative process in which users seek and traverse diverse and novel information as they investigate a conceptual space. The TweetBubble browser extension extends Twitter to enable expansion of social media associations@usernames and #hashtags-in-context, without overwriting initial content. We build on a prior metadata type system, developing new presentation semantics, which enable an integrated look and feel consistent with Twitter. We show how exploratory browsing constitutes a mini-c creative process. We use prior ideation metrics as a basis for new ideation metrics of exploratory browsing. We conducted a mixed methods crowdsourced study, with data from 54 participants, amidst the 2014 Academy Awards. Quantitative and qualitative findings validate the technique of in-context exploratory browsing interfaces for social media. Their consistency supports the validity of ideation metrics of exploratory browsing as an evaluation methodology for interactive systems designed to promote creative engagement.

A Free-Form Medium for Curating the Digital

We present a free-form medium of curation for digital arts catalogues, which connects an infinite zoomable canvas, sketching, and spatial arrangement of rich catalogue elements. We draw on an architectural theory that integrally joins the properties of building materials, construction techniques, and sites to develop a tectonic theory of media of digital curation. The theory addresses media of curation on two levels: the materials of elements that can be collected and the medium of assemblage, which prescribes how those elements can be joined together in a spatial matrix. The elements of prior digital arts catalogues are joined together in linear lists or grids. These assemblages do not scale well, making them agonizing to wade through when collections are large. Assemblage in our new, free-form medium supports curating across multiple scales, easing demands on visual attention, while opening conceptual horizons. We created an artifact, The Digital Curated, as an example of a digital arts catalogue represented in our new medium.