KnowledgePuzzle: a browsing tool to adapt the web navigation process to the learner's mental model

This article presents KnowledgePuzzle, a browsing tool for knowledge construction from the web. It aims to adapt the structure of web content to the learner’s information needs regardless of how the web content is originally delivered. Learners are provided with a meta-cognitive space (eg, a concept mapping tool) that enables them to plan navigation paths and visualize the semantic processing of knowledge in their minds. Once the learner’s viewpoint becomes visually represented, it will be transformed to a layer of informative hyperlinks and annotations over previously visited pages. The attached layer causes the web content to be explicitly structured to accommodate the learner’s interests by interlinking and annotating chunks of information that make up the learner’s knowledge. Finally, a hypertext version of the whole knowledge is generated to enable fast and easy reviewing. A discussion about the

Clui: A Platform for Handles to Rich Objects

On the desktop, users are accustomed to having visible handles to objects that they want to organize, share, or manipulate. Web applications today feature many classes of such objects, like flight itineraries, products for sale, people, recipes, and businesses, but there are no interoperable handles for high-level semantic objects that users can grab. This paper proposes Clui, a platform for exploring a new data type, called a Webit, that provides uniform handles to rich objects. Clui uses plugins to 1) create Webits on existing pages by extracting semantic data from those pages, and 2) augmenting existing sites with drag and drop targets that accept and interpret Webits. Users drag and drop Webits between sites to transfer data, auto-fill search forms, map associated locations, or share Webits with others. Clui enables experimentation with handles to semantic objects and the standards that underlie them

MONADIC VISUALIZATION OF METADATA NETWORKS TO SUPPORT EXPLORATORY BROWSING

Interactive data visualizations tend to either show an entire collection or the individual element. For example, a page of search results shows the whole, while clicking on an individual link shifts focus to the individual. With these kinds of interfaces, it can be difficult to understand how individual pieces relates to each other and maintain a sense of place amongst the network being perused. To address this, I develop a focus+context browsing tool that uses a monadic approach to visualizing networks of semantic information in the form of metadata summaries. Focus+context visualizations present both the full detail of an object and the contextual information needed to relate that object to the entirety. The monadic approach, first suggested by sociologist Gabriel Tarde, is the idea that a network is best comprehended from the perspective of individual elements. This stands in opposition to the standard approach of viewing the entirety of the network at once. Semantic information, such as product specs and bibliography, provides essential and valuable contexts for people to make sense of information, assess values, and make decisions. I present a study, in which participants explored networks of academic publications, showed that a monadic metadata visualization helps users explore networked information, understand relationships, and maintain focus, when compared with traditional methods. Allowing the user to traverse the network laterally while using metadata to provide a summary of the focus node serves to maximize the amount of focus and context available to the user

TweetBubble: A Twitter Extension Stimulates Exploratory Browsing

We extend the Twitter interface to stimulate exploratory browsing of social media and develop a method to establish its efficacy. In exploratory browsing, users seek and traverse diverse and novel information as they investigate a conceptual space. Social media has become a predominant source of information. Social media is characterized by rapidly evolving content and relationships. We need interface mechanisms to effectively and iteratively browse, search, and filter, i.e., explore vast social media networks. We develop the TweetBubble browser extension, extending Twitter to enable expansion of social media associations @usernames and #hashtags in-context, with-out overwriting initial content. We build on a prior metadata type system, developing new presentation semantics, which enable a look and feel consistent with Twitter. We identify exploratory browsing as a creative ideation process. We use prior ideation metrics as a basis for new ideation metrics of exploratory browsing. We conducted a 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. This research impacts the design and evaluation of interfaces that stimulate intrapersonal creativity, and thereby mutual understanding, by supporting exploratory browsing of connected perspectives in a shared, structured, conceptual space

Beyond the Feed and Board: Holistic Principles for Expressive Web Curation

We develop holistic principles for expressive web curation through the iterative design and study of a new medium and system, IdeaMâché. Web curation is the process of gathering and assembling content into online exhibits. The linear organization of the feed - e.g., Facebook and Twitter - and board - e.g., Pinterest - constrains authors in expressing themselves. We conducted a field study of IdeaMâché with 472 undergraduate student users. Quantitative, qualitative, and visual data show how students expressed themselves and developed ideas. Interaction logs show how students utilized expressive operations. We analyze students' creative works with ideation metrics of curation. Interviews expose users' underlying motivations and experiences. Visual data is compelling. While iteratively designing IdeaMâché features in conjunction with the mixed methods data, we derive holistic design principles for media and systems supporting expressive web curation: direct clipping with context, diverse and heterogeneous media, freeform non-linear medium of assemblage, multi-scale organization, sketching as annotation, and novice-friendly direct manipulation command selection and parameter adjustment

SWAT

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, February 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 52-54).This thesis introduces the Stateful Web Augmentation Toolkit (SWAT), a toolkit that gives users control over the presentation and functionality of web content. SWAT extends Chickenfoot, a Firefox browser scripting environment that offers a variety of automation and manipulation capabilities. SWAT allows programmers to identify data records in database-backed web sites. Records are nodes of data corresponding to rows in the database backend. Programmers can append additional functionality to those nodes, and the resulting code can be bundled up and installed by users without technical expertise. SWAT consists of three modules: a Site Profile module that identifies data records, a Tweak module that defines the look and behavior of an interactive widget, and a Storage module that persists the widget state across pages and browser sessions. Default implementations are provided for each module, and these implementations adhere to an API that encompasses all communication between modules. A programmer can extend or replace any module to improve a system built with SWAT. With SWAT, end users can customize sites far beyond where their content providers stopped, and can add functionality that logically connects different data sources, changes how and where data is stored, and redefines how they interact with the web.by Matthew J. Webber.M.Eng

Meta-Metadata: An Information Semantic Language and Software Architecture for Collection Visualization Application

Information collection and discovery tasks involve aggregation and manipulation of information resources. An information resource is a location from which a human gathers data to contribute to his/her understanding of something significant. Repositories of information resources include the Google search engine, the ACM Digital Library, Wikipedia, Flickr, and IMDB. Information discovery tasks involve having new ideas in contexts of information collecting. The information one needs to collect is large and diverse and hard to keep track of. The heterogeneity and scale also make difficult writing software to support information collection and discovery tasks. Metadata is a structured means for describing information resources. It forms the basis of digital libraries and search engines. As metadata is often called, "data about data," we define meta-metadata as a formal means for describing metadata as an XML based language. We consider the lifecycle of metadata in information collection and discovery tasks and develop a metametadata architecture which deals with the data structures for representation of metadata inside programs, extraction from information resources, rules for presentation to users, and logic that defines how an application needs to operate on metadata. Semantic actions for an information resource collection are steps taken to generate representative objects, including formation of iconographic image and text surrogates, associated with metadata. The meta-metadata language serves as a layer of abstraction between information resources, power users, and application developers. A power user can enhance an existing collection visualization application by authoring meta-metadata for a new information resource without modifying the application source code. The architecture provides a set of interfaces for semantic actions which different information discovery and visualization applications can implement according to their own custom requirements. Application developers can modify the implementation of these semantic actions to change the behavior of their application, regardless of the information resource. We have used our architecture in combinFormation, an information discovery and collection visualization application and validated it through a user study

Design and Evaluation of Social CheatSheet: A Community-Curated Software Help Overlay

Software users can often find it difficult to sift through dense help pages, tutorials, Q&A sites, blogs, and other resources, trying to locate useful task-specific instructions for the applications they use. We present Social CheatSheet, an interactive information overlay that can appear atop any existing web application and retrieve relevant step-by-step instructions, tips, and tutorials curated by a community of software users. Based on the findings from two formative studies, the system offers several features for users to search, browse, filter, and bookmark community-generated help content, and to ask questions and seek clarifications. Furthermore, Social CheatSheet includes embedded curation features for users to generate, annotate, and categorize their own visual notes and tutorials, which can be kept private or shared publicly with the user community. A week-long deployment study with 15 participants showed that users were able to easily add and curate their own content and locate help resources generated by other users. They found the social curation approach to be helpful in a variety of contexts, and the majority of users wanted to keep using the system beyond the deployment. We discuss the potential of Social CheatSheet, as an application-independent platform driven by community curation efforts, to lower the barriers in finding relevant help and instructions for feature-rich applications

Smart bookmarks : automatic retroactive macro recording on the web

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 82-83).New technology has made the Web more dynamic and personalized, while at the same time interaction with the Web has become more complicated and involved. This thesis presents Smart Bookmarks, a web automation system that allows users to automate complex tasks or easily return to otherwise hard-to-reach dynamic web pages by creating smart bookmarks. A smart bookmark consists of an automatically generated script of recorded browsing commands that returns to a particular web page or web application state. Smart bookmarks can be created retroactively, meaning that the user does not need to explicitly initiate recording before performing a task, but can instead request a bookmark after visiting the destination page; the appropriate sequence of commands need to return to a page is selected automatically from a history of the user's browsing interactions. Smart Bookmarks provides a rich, visual representation of recorded bookmarks in order to clearly illustrate the actions that a bookmark performs, and includes textual descriptions, screenshots, and animated previews of each command. Finally, the system allows users to easily and intuitively edit bookmarks after they have been created, and to share smart bookmarks with other users.by Darris Hupp.M.Eng