vwise: visual workspace for information seeking and exploration
TRANSCRIPT
vWise: Visual Workspace for
Information Seeking and ExplorationNeal Audenaert [email protected]
Matthew Barry, Paul Bilnoski
Texas Center for Applied Technology
Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station
Objectives
Background: Designing thematic research collections for scholarly use
Primary: Approach for working with information for scholarly research that
moves beyond search
Ground that approach in light of prior work on scholarly information seeking
Secondary: Demonstrate the vWise tool that embodies that approach
Framework for developers rather than a finished product
Not (quite) ready
Motivation
Search is good
Finding what you’re looking for
Exploratory searching (e.g., facetted browsing)
Motivation
Search is good, but . . .
Scholarly information seeking is characterized by:
Long-term, deep engagement with primary material
Comprehensive survey of secondary literature
Deeply internalized understanding of the body of knowledge
Cultivate their own interpretive voice
Motivation
Search is good, but . . .
But, scholarly information seeking is more complex
Need environments that help researchers
Gather, organize, systematize and synthesize information
Pursue an evolving research objective
Work with diverse information
Application Search Bar External Content
Personal Notes Custom Interactive Panels
Local Content
Characterizing
Scholarly Information Seeking
Information Triage
Incremental Formalism
Representational Talkback
Heterogeneous Sources and Material
Information Triage
Too much information
Too little time
Marshall, C. C. and Shipman, F. M., III (1997). Spatial
Hypertext and the Practice of Information Triage.
Incremental
Formalism
People cannot formalize
knowledge
People will not formalize
knowledge
Shipman, F. M. and Marshall, C. C. (1999).
Formality Considered Harmful
Representational
Talkback
Externalizations of knowledge
provide a tangible site for
refection in/on action
Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner:
How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books.
Heterogeneous
Material & Sources
Different types of content
Different digital collections
Different interaction needs
Future Work
Near Term
Concurrent multi-user
Workspace history
Aspirational
Interpret implicit structure
Model user interests
Mixed initiative interfaces
Constructed histories
Alternative displays
Remarks
About vWise
User interface library vs. application
Some assembly required (AngularJS + Backend Integration)
Active development (available Fall 2016)
Contact me ([email protected])
Not About vWise
Paradigm for supporting scholarly research
Many previous and current tools
Grounded in robust history of interface design research
Resources
GitHub: https://github.com/tcat-tamu/vWise (currently older version)
Demo: http://sda.tamu.edu/vwise (ready by the end of the day)
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/