Published Papers Available on DCOG-HCI Lab Web Site

Current Working Papers

Spatial Tools for Managing Personal Information Collections
Dan Bauer, Pierre Fastrez, and Jim Hollan

Abstract

Dynapad is a development environment designed to support research prototyping of multiscale workspaces. In this paper we describe applications designed to facilitate visual access to and spatial organization of digital photo collections and personal libraries of PDF documents. The research objective is to explore a generalization of the notion of a “pile” as a foundation for a versatile suite of tools to provide unobtrusive assistance for organizational and other sensemaking activities. We detail the architecture underlying the applications, explain how it supports diverse functionality and interaction styles, and abstract a set of principles for designing spatial tools.

Digital Photos as Conversational Anchors
Ryan Y. Sit, James D. Hollan, and William G. Griswold

Abstract

During shared viewing printed photos frequently serve as anchors for conversations. Conversational interactions are less common when images are not printed. People do not commonly gather around a monitor to look at digital images, although the passing around of cell phones and digital cameras displaying images is increasingly common. The congeniality of paper has many advantages for synchronous sharing. Although both printed and digital images can be shared asynchronously, the effort required frequently precludes such sharing. JussPress (www.jusspress.com) is a system designed to minimize the effort involved in sharing digital photos. It enables instant publishing and organization. Automatic temporal organization of the photos is shown to have many advantages. Additionally, by making comments easy to make, read, and check, web-based photos also became anchors for conversations. We discuss the coherence of these conversations, instances of them spanning multiple photos, their organizational impact, and why conversations were infrequent for some users.