A quick reminder of this event in Palo Alto this evening. Tonight’s event is a joint program of SDForum Virtual World SIG and the SDForum Tech Women’s Program featuring a panel of women who build, create, and work in virtual worlds ranging from NASA to games to Second Life. Directions here.
FXPAL has a YouTube page where we publish various videos of research systems. Right now, the following recent projects have one or more vidoes on the site
Shortly before my son was born, I had attended a lecture about multilingualism and children. The talk backed my desire to raise him bi-lingually with some practical advice. Much of the lecture revolved around the book Raising Multilingual Children by Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa. The book is about children’s abilities to learn languages; it is based on several cases studies of bi- or multi-lingual children (including the author’s), and backed up with considerable research.
Recently, a new class of search applications that support collaborative information seeking has emerged. In these systems, users work in small groups with a shared information need, rather than relying on large numbers of anonymous users with potentially diverging information needs. One clear way to distinguish different social search activities has been proposed by Colum Foley. In his PhD thesis, he characterizes search systems on two dimensions, “Sharing of Knowledge” and “Division of labor.” Sharing of knowledge separates all social search systems from traditional single-user approaches, while division of labor separates social search from collaborative search.
This is Part 2 of (at least) 5 in a series of posts about Collaborative Information Seeking. Part 1 is found here.
The most important dimension for distinguishing between various types of collaboration is the intent with which users of a system approach each other for the collaboration.
In his recent post, Daniel Tunkelang issued a call for renewed interest in recall as a measure of performance of information retrieval systems, particularly for exploratory search tasks. It is interesting to note that there are several possible ways to measure recall and precision for interactive tasks, and which measure you should use depends on what aspect of the entire human-computer system you are interested in.
Daniel Tunkelang’s recent post on Twitter search got me thinking about what an HCIR geek would do, which produced the following random thoughts.
First, we should start with tasks. What kinds of information do people want to find in tweet streams? Do they want to find a document that’s been referenced? Do they want information about an event? Are they interested in finding a community of interest? What other useful tasks are there with respect to this stream?
I decided to take a crack at Daniel’s Tunkelang’s search challenge #1, finding the origins of his name. The following post is an account of my search moves, which struck me as interesting enough to blog about.
In an earlier post, I described Waterworth and Chignell’s model of information exploration, and distinguished in from other theories ad models of information seeking in that it tried to address some aspects of interaction.The main problem with the model is related to the structural responsibility dimension. Structural responsibility models “who [system or user] is concerned with the structure [of the data]”, but since the user can only interact with the constructs exposed by the system through the interface, and the same structures can be expressed in many different ways, this dimension fails to capture a distinction that’s useful for design.
In his Hypertext ’97 keynote address, broadcast from the US to Southampton, UK, Ted Nelson lamented that (for the hypertext community) the Web was like waking up one day and discovering you had a teenage son, who was a juvenile delinquent. There was much concern among hypertext researchers that the web in general (and Tim Berners-Lee in particular) had gotten it all wrong because they had ignored the years of scholarship about how to build hypertext systems.