Visual information seeking on palmtop devices

Ahlberg and Shneiderman's Starfield displays have been shown to provide fast and convenient access to large collections of data. However, the standard design requires a large, high-resolution, colour screen. This paper presents the results of a short project investigating this visual information seeking technique on a monochrome palmtop

How Does Web Advertising Affect Users' Information Seeking, Website Evaluation, and Source

Web advertising (ads) is currently a big issue for information seeking behavior on the Internet. Since websites are an important source of information in our daily lives, the websites have become popular media for advertising. The advertisers think that Web ads are the best way to get people to know quickly many things about a product or service [7]. However, from the viewers??? perspective, Web ads can be considered an obstacle to users??? information seeking on a website. Actually, Web ads received complains as being annoying or intruding, and it is considered to have negative effects such as affecting people???s task performance by many researchers [2, 5, 6]. The objective of this research is to know how Web advertising affects users??? information seeking, website evaluation, and source evaluation. Most previous studies have focused on the effectiveness of Web ads toward viewers. Not many studies researched on how Web ads affect users??? information seeking performance, website evaluation, and content evaluation of a website. According to visual attention theory, since people???s visual attention is limited, the more attention Web ads received from a viewer, the less amount of attention was available for the visual search task and the more damaging it was to the search task [5]. Therefore, Web ads will affect people???s information seeking performance, and consequently it will influence website evaluation and source evaluation of the website. My research question is: how do different types of Web advertising which attract people???s attention at differing levels affect users??? information seeking performance, website evaluation, and source evaluation? I will employ an empirical research design with various levels of attention grabbing Web ads and users??? information seeking performance, website evaluation, and source evaluation. I will use a total of 200 college students as the sample population in this research, and I will randomly assign the participants into four different groups (50 participants in each group): three experimental groups for low, medium, and high attention grabbing Web ads and one control group (a group with no Web ads). There would be no significant difference between groups in terms of years of computer experience, years of Internet experience, and gender

The impact of information needs satisfaction on the creativity of visual art teachers.

The aim of this study is to investigate how the information needs satisfaction of visual art teachers affects their creativity. Visual art teachers' information seeking behaviour and specifically the association of information needs satisfaction with creativity has been an understudied area, despite competent information seeking being considered essential for high quality practices of art teachers. A questionnaire survey was developed addressing the information seeking behaviour of art teachers, informed by Wilson's model (1981), including visual art teachers' information needs, information resources, obstacles faced while seeking information and the perceived impact of information needs satisfaction on visual art teachers' creativity. The study included 298 visual art teachers in Greece. The results demonstrated that the key information needs of art teachers were mainly related to materials' properties, techniques for creating artwork, and artwork promotion methods. Online information sources were the preferred sources of art information, followed by colleagues, personal collections, and visits to galleries and museums Our study identified lack of time, lack of specialized libraries, and copyright, as the main barriers to information seeking. Information about art plays a substantial role in visual art education, while visual art teachers' information needs satisfaction positively influences their creative endeavours. There is a need to further explore the digital information needs of visual art teachers

Personal influence in information-seeking behaviour of art students

Abstract: This article investigated personal influence in the information-seeking behaviour of art students. A qualitative approach was followed, and the data were collected by means of interviews with 11 art students of The Open Window School of Visual Communication, located in Pretoria, South Africa. The Open Window offers degrees and postgraduate honours degrees in Visual Communication. The key findings revealed that the personal dimension in information-seeking behaviour has a significant influence on art students’ information needs and is prevalent in their personal interests and preferences and their motivation to seek information. The findings provided insight into how the art students’ information-seeking behaviour might influence the library as an information service

AVIS: Autonomous Visual Information Seeking with Large Language Model Agent

In this paper, we propose an autonomous information seeking visual question answering framework, AVIS. Our method leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) to dynamically strategize the utilization of external tools and to investigate their outputs, thereby acquiring the indispensable knowledge needed to provide answers to the posed questions. Responding to visual questions that necessitate external knowledge, such as "What event is commemorated by the building depicted in this image?", is a complex task. This task presents a combinatorial search space that demands a sequence of actions, including invoking APIs, analyzing their responses, and making informed decisions. We conduct a user study to collect a variety of instances of human decision-making when faced with this task. This data is then used to design a system comprised of three components: an LLM-powered planner that dynamically determines which tool to use next, an LLM-powered reasoner that analyzes and extracts key information from the tool outputs, and a working memory component that retains the acquired information throughout the process. The collected user behavior serves as a guide for our system in two key ways. First, we create a transition graph by analyzing the sequence of decisions made by users. This graph delineates distinct states and confines the set of actions available at each state. Second, we use examples of user decision-making to provide our LLM-powered planner and reasoner with relevant contextual instances, enhancing their capacity to make informed decisions. We show that AVIS achieves state-of-the-art results on knowledge-intensive visual question answering benchmarks such as Infoseek and OK-VQA.Comment: Published on NeurIPS 202

Combining Visual and Textual Features for Semantic Segmentation of Historical Newspapers

The massive amounts of digitized historical documents acquired over the last decades naturally lend themselves to automatic processing and exploration. Research work seeking to automatically process facsimiles and extract information thereby are multiplying with, as a first essential step, document layout analysis. If the identification and categorization of segments of interest in document images have seen significant progress over the last years thanks to deep learning techniques, many challenges remain with, among others, the use of finer-grained segmentation typologies and the consideration of complex, heterogeneous documents such as historical newspapers. Besides, most approaches consider visual features only, ignoring textual signal. In this context, we introduce a multimodal approach for the semantic segmentation of historical newspapers that combines visual and textual features. Based on a series of experiments on diachronic Swiss and Luxembourgish newspapers, we investigate, among others, the predictive power of visual and textual features and their capacity to generalize across time and sources. Results show consistent improvement of multimodal models in comparison to a strong visual baseline, as well as better robustness to high material variance

Dynamic Queries for Visual Information Seeking

The capacity to incrementally adjust a query (with sliders, buttons, selections from a set of discrete attribute values, etc.) coupled with a visual display of results that are rapidly updated, dramatically changes the information seeking process. Dynamic queries on the chemical table of elements, computer directories, and a real estate database were built and tested in three separate exploratory experiments. Preliminary results show highly significant performance improvements and user enthusiasm more commonly seen with video games. Widespread application seems possible but research issues abound in the areas of: (1) graphic visualization design, (2) database and display algorithms, and (3) user interface requirements. Challenges include methods for rapidly displaying and changing many points, colors, and areas; multi-dimensional pointing and exploring using 6 degree of freedom input/output devices; incorporation of sound and visual display techniques that increase user comprehension; and integration with existing database systems. (Also cross-referenced as CAR-TR-655) (Also cross-referenced as SRC-TR-93-3) Original paper (September 1993), revised (January 1994

Collecting and compiling: The activity of seeking pictures in primary school

Purpose: The aim of this study is to further understanding of the situated activity of seeking pictures. It relates to an ongoing discussion on how multimodal information literacies are enacted in different social practices. Design/methodology/approach: In order to understand the characteristics of the communication and interactions in the activity of seeking pictures, video recordings from an ethnographic study of primary school children working with problem-centred assignments have been analysed. Findings: The analysis reveals how the activity of seeking pictures is shaped by the assumption that pictures are different from facts and information; pictures are seen primarily as having decorative functions. The activity is also characterised by playful, yet efficient cooperation between the children; they make the activity meaningful by transforming it into a play and game activity where pictures become important as physical objects, but not as a semiotic means of learning. Research limitations/implications: The study is limited to the activity of seeking pictures in a specific primary school; however, it shows how modes other than textual modes can be included in the study of information activities. Practical implications: The study reveals the need for developing methods for enhancing children's possibilities to critically examine and learn from visual material, such as pictures. Originality/value: Research on information seeking and information literacies rarely focus on multimodal aspects of information activities or the seeking of pictures outside special collections, despite the increased significance of visual material in the contemporary media landscape. This paper shows how studies of multimodal information activities can be designed