Choose Your Own Adventure

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Historically, the Hypertext research community is an intertwingling (a Ted Nelson-logism) of three distinct strands — structural computing, interaction, and HT literature, which could be mapped, roughly, onto the engineers, the HCI folk, and the humanists. While engineering and HCI aspects were somewhat necessary for HT literature, the focus, by definition, has been on exploring the boundaries of electronic literature. In the end, I think, it’s good writing that makes hypertext literature interesting much more so than clever interaction. In fact, the electronic component is often not necessary at all: see If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, for example.

But there is room for beauty in interaction as well. Thanks to Mark Bernstein of Eastgate, I came across a beautiful set of visualizations of narrative structure of CYOA, a series of hypertext books for children. Through a variety of charts and graphs like the one shown here, the author of these diagrams conveys the many alternate paths through a each story in the collection, and uses these visuals to compare, to analyze, and to appreciate the books. And don’t forget the animations, accessible through a link near the top of the page.

My retelling won’t do it justice; take a look for yourself, and think about these designs next time you’re building a slide deck.

Finally, since these stories are now available as Kindle editions, in principle, it would be possible to collect actual reading paths that readers take through the works, and subject them to the same analyses. What sorts of hypotheses about reading, personality, and interaction could we answer with such data?

Preliminary TOC for the IP&M Special Issue on Collaborative Info Seeking

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We are nearing the end of editing the Special Issue of Information Processing & Management, and are proud to announce the papers that will be in the issue. The Special Issue was the result of the 1st collaborative search workshop we organized at JCDL 2008; the next workshop is coming up soon! We had many submissions on a variety of related topics, including field work and other reporting that characterized instances of collaboration in information seeking, evaluation and models of collaborative episodes, and a number of system and algorithm papers.

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Print media and augmented reality

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December’s issue of Esquire features augmented reality not only on its cover but a couple of places inside. This is not the first instance of AR on print media, of course, but it’s nicely done. I’d love to see this sort of thing make its way into scientific publishing eventually, for 3d and animated illustrations and data visualization. Right now authors can put digital content related to their work out on the web, but it’s an altogether different subjective experience when it’s integrated into the printed object (book, journal, etc.).

Here’s a video tour of the AR in the Esquire issue:

And comments from mashable:

“Print might be in trouble, but Esquire magazine won’t be going gently into that good night. The December issue of the magazine will feature augmented reality pages that will come alive when displayed in front of a webcam.

Augmented reality is a trend and phenomenon we’re starting to see more and more uses of across the web. In March, GE played with augmented reality while showing off its Smart Grid technology. Earlier this month, musician John Mayer released an augmented reality enhanced music video. The Disney.com iPhone app that was released earlier this week also utilizes some AR features.”

SIGCHI Reviewing

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James Landay raised the right idea – it is time for systems people in the CHI community to take control of UIST.  That conference was setup in the 1980’s because systems papers were being excluded from CHI.  So, rather than complain, I think a half dozen senior people in CHI community should get themselves on the UIST program committee, including the Chair.  Then, make the conference you want it to be.

James, you might be the best choice for PC Chair.

RT done wrong

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Retweet annotated with the new Twitter metadataSome time this summer Twitter announced its RT (retweet) API, a structured way of expressing the forwarding (often with comments) of others tweets that has, until now, been expressed informally by prepending the letters RT to another person’s tweet. The practice of retweeting (described in a forth-coming paper by danah boyd, Scott Golder, and Gilad Lotan) has evolved several conventions for crediting the source and incorporating comments. In addition to forwarding and commenting on the message, it can also serve as a useful mechanism to introduce people to others worth following.

The new API formalizes this notion, but also subverts established practice.

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2nd CFP: Workshop on collaborative search at CSCW2010

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Merrie Morris, Jeremy Pickens and I are organizing a second workshop on collaborative information seeking to be held in conjunction with CSCW2010 on Feb 7, 2010. More details on an earlier post about the workshop, and on the workshop site itself. Look over the position papers from the first workshop (some of which will be published in an IP&M Special Issue soon), and submit one yourself!

Looking forward to lots of good discussion!

How to give up on reviewing

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Angst turns to anger to acceptance (of your lot, if not of your paper). Yes, it’s the CHI 2010 rebuttal period. A short few days to try to address the reviewers’ misreading of your paper before the program committee throws it into the reject pile, requiring you to rewrite it for another conference. While it is easy to find fault with the process that puts one or more person-years’ of work into the hands of “three angry men” who may or may not be in a position to judge the work fairly, it is not clear how to improve the process. James Landay recently wrote about the frustrations of getting systems papers accepted, and in a comment on that post, jofish pointed out that the concerns apply more widely because CHI consists of many small communities with different methodological expectations that are not necessarily appreciated by reviewers.

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Procedural vs. declarative programming

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Steven Pemberton gave a talk at FXPAL today where he talked about the virtues of declarative programming, and specifically about XForms. He cited some interesting statistics about the incidence of errors as a function of the size of the program, including the observation by Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man Month that the number of bugs increases as L1.5. So the way to increase the reliability of code is to reduce the amount of code that has to be written to achieve a particular result. Declarative programming, Steven argues, is an improvement over its predecessors (high-level programming languages, and interpreted programming languages) because declarative programming focuses the programmer’s attention on the application logic and dispenses with worrying about the “fiddly bits.”

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Designing User Friendly Augmented Work Environments

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We’re happy to note that the book “Designing User Friendly Augmented Work Environments” (edited by Saadi Lahlou) has been published by Springer, in hardcover with an online version available. We have a chapter in it on our USE smart conference room system: “Designing an Easy-to-Use Executive Conference Room Control System.” The chapter starts with some of the field work we did to understand the work flows of the stakeholders, and then describes the evolution of the system we built to support the executive, his assistant, and others who used the meeting room. The system developed during this project was the precursor to the DICE system.

The process of writing and publishing this chapter took a considerable amount of time, and thus it is interesting to look back on some of our early designs to see how they have evolved. One aspect that changed was the name of project: we started out calling the system USE (Usable Smart Environment) and that terminology is used in the book chapter. By the time we completed this project and moved onto the larger conference room, we changed the name to DICE (Distributed Intelligent Conferencing Environment). DICE now runs in both rooms, and USE is the name of Gene’s group, just to add to the confusion.

For more information on this work, check out the video, some before/after pictures, and the CHI 2009 paper. We’re also working on a journal article that extends the CHI findings. Look for it in a few years!

Crowdsourcing relevance

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Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is increasingly being used to obtain judgments of relevance that can be used to establish gold standards with which to evaluate information seeking experiments. The attraction is clear: for a few bucks, in a few days, you can obtain data that is every bit as useful for evaluating simulations and other off-line experiments as data collected in the lab from “live” participants, and may be a good substitute for TREC assessors’ judgments. And of course the scale of the enterprise is such that you can run complex multi-factor experiments and still retain enough power. If you’re not up to doing this yourself, companies such as Dolores Labs will do it for you.

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