Distributed collaborative writing: a comparison of spoken and written modalities for reviewing and revising documents

Previous research indicates that voice annotation helps reviewers to express the more complex and social aspects of a collaborative writing task. Little direct evidence exists, however, about the effect of voice annotations on the writers who must use such annotations. To test the effect, we designed an interface intended to alleviate some of the problems associated with the voice modality and undertook a study with two goals; to compare the nature and quantity of voice and written comments, and to evaluate how writers responded to comments produced in each mode. Writers were paired with reviewers who made either written or spoken annotations from which the writers revised. The study provides direct evidence that the greater expressivity of the voice modality, which previous research suggested benefits reviewers, produces annotations that writers also find usable. Interactions of modality with the type of annotation suggest specific advantages of each mode for enhancing the processes of review and revision

Assoc. Computer Support for Distributed Collaborative Writing: A Coordination Science Perspective

The goal of our research is to provide computer support for distributed collaborative writing. Writers can be said to be distributed when they have distributed knowledge and skill, and they share that knowledge and skill in order to develop a draft; or, even when they have significant overlap in knowledge and skill, they distribute the work of producing the draft itself among them. But in this sense, all collaborative writing is distributed. In the sense we will use the term here, distributed collaborative writing refers to, additionally, situations in which the writers are distributed in time (i.e., they do not work on the artifact at the same time) or place (i.e., they do not meet face-to-face). The central research questions in distributed collaborative writing are "What does the process of producing a written product look like when it is divided among writers who coordinate to produce it over time and space? " and "What is the relationship of these processes to success? " When the process includes "active agents, " the scope of the first question shifts slightly to include not only people, but computers as well. This question is, of course, the central question of "distributed cognition " or "coordination science, " applied to collaborative writing. In analogy with the way cognitive scientists (psychologists, AI researchers, etc.) are interested in identifying strategies and representations involved in individual cognition, coordination scientists are intereste