Where My Books Go: Choice and Place in Digital Reading

Digital reading is a topic of rising interest in digital libraries, particularly in terms of optimizing the reading experience. However, there is relatively little data on the patterns of digital reading, including issues of where and what users read, and how they organize, plan and conduct their reading sessions. This paper reports the first data on mobile reading, combining insights from three different studies of users, including diary studies, interviews and ethnomethodological work. The data reveals that reading often depends on highly developed and rehearsed practices, especially when the reading is related to study or research. From this, we are able to identify a number of opportunities for further digital library research to better support the needs of users

Balancing human and system visualization during document triage

People must frequently sort through and identify relevant materials from a large set of documents. Document triage is a specific form of information collecting where people quickly evaluate a large set of documents from the Internet by reading (or skimming) documents and organizing them into a personal information collection. During triage people can re-read documents, progressively refine their organization, and share results with others. People usually perform triage using multiple applications in concert: a search engine interface presents lists of potentially relevant documents; a document reader displays their content; and a text editor or a more specialized application records notes and assessments. However, people often become disoriented while switching between these subtasks in document triage. This can hinder the interaction between the subtasks and can distract people from focusing on documents of interest. To support document triage, we have developed an environment that infers users’ interests based on their interactions with multiple applications and on an analysis of the characteristics and content of the documents they are interacting with. The inferred user interest is used to relieve disorientation by generating visualizations in multiple applications that help people find documents of interest as well as interesting sections within documents

Challenges and Techniques for Personal Environment Management

People today use the computer for many simultaneous work projects and activities. The traditional file system was developed for storing and retrieving files and it and the desktop have not evolved with users' practices. The first part of the dissertation presents a user study that generates a better understanding of the issues and practices regarding the organization of documents in support of activities. The second part provides the design of an environment to organize information based on an activity paradigm as opposed to an archiving paradigm and delivers the instantiation and the evaluation of a system based on such a design. The system, called Docksy, provides an environment structured in workspaces. Each workspace is segmented in areas or panels. Users can use documents as elements to structure their workflow or to manage their activities by separating files in the different panels, and by adding comments, tags, and flags. The Docksy design aims to create a flexible, lightweight environment that is easy to use and can be incorporated into users' daily practice, old or new. Such a system could be used to learn about users' practices and their evolution. Docksy was therefore developed for a double purpose; the short term purpose of testing new features (panels, comments, flags, and tags) and the long term purpose of facilitating learning about user practices. A study of Docksy use was conducted in which twenty participants used Docksy for at least two weeks and they were then interviewed. The study showed that participants valued the panels and the comment features. The results of the study showed the potential for changing users' practice and the potential for the system to be adopted by users

CritSpace: An Interactive Visual Interface to Digital Collections of Cultural Heritage Material

Cultural heritage digital libraries have become an important and prominent tool within humanities scholarship, offering increased expressive power for representing complex networks of relationships and the ability to use computational tools and interactive environments to help researchers ask new questions. While digital libraries offer tremendous advantages for publishing the final products of scholarship, in the words of Bradley and Vetch, "as they currently are delivered, do not intersect terribly meaningfully with the process of scholarly research." In this work I investigate how scholars use visually complex source documents-materials where access to a visual representation of the original object is required and present a prototype system, CritSpace designed to facilitate scholarly engagement with digital resources. Rather than creating a one-size-fits-all application, CritSpace is a web-based framework for building interactive visual interfaces that support scholarly use of digital libraries. The theory and design behind CritSpace is based on a formative study of the work practices of scholars from different disciplines and prior research in field of spatial hypertext. To illustrate a concrete example of using CritSpace and to evaluate its usefulness, I conclude with a case study that walks through the process of deploying CritSpace to support work in a specific scholarly domain, textual criticism and presents a summative usability study of the tool. The results of this study show that CritSpace is effective at supporting textual criticism. More significantly, they also indicate that the innovations added in CritSpace promote the intensive analysis of visual material in addition to knowledge organization and structuring

Cognitive Activity Support Tools: Design of the Visual Interface

This dissertation is broadly concerned with interactive computational tools that support the performance of complex cognitive activities, examples of which are analytical reasoning, decision making, problem solving, sense making, forecasting, and learning. Examples of tools that support such activities are visualization-based tools in the areas of: education, information visualization, personal information management, statistics, and health informatics. Such tools enable access to information and data and, through interaction, enable a human-information discourse. In a more specific sense, this dissertation is concerned with the design of the visual interface of these tools. This dissertation presents a large and comprehensive theoretical framework to support research and design. Issues treated herein include interaction design and patterns of interaction for cognitive and epistemic support; analysis of the essential properties of interactive visual representations and their influences on cognitive and perceptual processes; an analysis of the structural components of interaction and how different operational forms of interaction components affect the performance of cognitive activities; an examination of how the information-processing load should be distributed between humans and tools during the performance of complex cognitive activities; and a categorization of common visualizations according to their structure and function, and a discussion of the cognitive utility of each category. This dissertation also includes a chapter that describes the design of a cognitive activity support tool, as guided by the theoretical contributions that comprise the rest of the dissertation. Those that may find this dissertation useful include researchers and practitioners in the areas of data and information visualization, visual analytics, medical and health informatics, data science, journalism, educational technology, and digital games