Texas Center for Digital Humanities and New Media

We propose the creation of a Center for Digital Humanities, Media and Culture (formerly titled Texas Center for Digital Humanities and New Media). The Center will address two related grand challenges: the need to investigate the relationship of computing technologies and culture, and the need to construct cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences. The Center’s research, focused in four interrelated areas -- the cultural record, cultural systems, cultural environments, and cultural interactions in the digital age – engages one of the most compelling questions of our time: What does it mean to be human in the digital age

Patterns of Reading and Organizing Information in Document Triage

People engaged in knowledge work must often rapidly identify valuable material from within large sets of potentially relevant documents. Document triage is a type of sensemaking task that involves skimming documents to get a sense of their content, evaluating documents to assess their worth in the context of the current activity, and organizing documents to prepare for their subsequent use and more in-depth reading. We have performed a study of document triage by collecting multiple forms of qualitative and quantitative data to characterize how 24 subjects read about a new topic and assessed and organized a set of 40 relevant Web documents. Our results indicate that there are multiple strategies for document triage, each involving different styles of reading, interacting, and organizing. Common strategies include: 1) focused reading early in the task, relegating the organizing until later in the process; 2) skimming performed in tandem with organizing, which relies on gaining an incremental understanding of the topic; and 3) metadata-based organizing, a strategy that stresses working with document surrogates to minimize the time spent reading. The findings suggest ways applications may better support the intertwined nature of the browsing, reading, and organizing activities in document triage

Boston, Massachusetts USA * April24-28,1994 Humarr Facfors inComputiigSystems I&?! Supporting Knowledge-Base Evolution with Incremental Formalization

Computers require formally represented information to support users but users often cannot provide it. This paper looks at an approach called “incremental formalization”, when users express information informally and the system supports them in formalizing it. Incremental formalization requires a system architecture that can integrate formal and informal representations and enable and support moving information upward in formality. The system should include tools to capture naturally available informal information and knowledge-based techniques to suggest possible formalizations of this informal information. The Hyper-Object Substrate (HOS), a system with these characteristics, has been applied to a variety of domains, including network design, archeological site analysis and neuroscience education. Users were successful in adding information informally and in incrementally formalizing that information. In particular, informal text was added, which later had attributes added and partook of inheritance relationships

Supporting Knowledge-Base Evolution with Incremental Formalization

Computers require formally represented information to support users but users often cannot provide it. This paper looks at an approach called “incremental formalization”, when users express information informally and the system supports them in formalizing it. Incremental formalization requires a system architecture that can integrate formal and informal representations and enable and support moving information upward in formality. The system should include tools to capture naturally available informal information and knowledge-based techniques to suggest possible formalizations of this informal information. The Hyper-Object Substrate (HOS), a system with these characteristics, has been applied to a variety of domains, including network design, archeological site analysis and neuroscience education. Users were successful in adding information informally and in incrementally formalizing that information. In particular, informal text was added, which later had attributes added and partook of inheritance relationships