Scott Robertson

Abstract In this paper, we present a case study of human-information interaction in the online realm of politics. The case study consists of a participant observed while searching and browsing the internet for campaign information in a mock-voting situation while taking notes that were to be shared with others. Interaction analysis of the case study data consisted of applying Information Foraging Theory to understand participant specific behaviors in searching and browsing. Case study results show skewed time allocation to activities, a ...

ABSTRACT In this paper, we present a short description of a web portal that helps voters decide about candidates and issues. VotesBy. US (www. VotesBy. US) was designed, and developed from the perspective of voter-centered design. Voter-centered design is a “design science” approach to the study of technology-enhanced political information browsing behavior. Using VotesBy. US, we are conducting a program of research aimed at understanding digital deliberation in the context of making voting decisions. Specifically, ...

Libraries are hubs for social and intellectual interactions in communities and organizations. Virtual libraries should serve the same purpose, yet virtual libraries often focus simply on making their holdings available. In this article an on-line corporate library is described that places knowledge sharing and community building at the core of its design. The library system supports personal websites that are visible to the entire organization. Personal topic profiles for library research services, information services choice and collaborative research requests provide employees with views of each others' activities and interests. In particular, information about research questions being asked across all parts of the organization provides a unique window on the company's goals and activities. Collaboration and interest-matching tools help employees to share knowledge across the oraganization and to form special interest communities.

Scenarios are a natural and effective medium for thinking in general and for design in particular. Our work seeks to develop a potential unification between recent scenario-oriented work in object-oriented analysis/design methods and scenario-oriented work in the analysis/design of human-computer interaction. We illustrate this perspective by showing: (1) how scenario questioning can be used to systematically interrogate the knowledge and practices of potential users, and thereby to create object-oriented analysis models that are psychologically valid; (2) how depicting an individual object's point-of-view can serve as a pedagogical scaffold to help students of object-oriented analysis see how to identify and assign object responsibilities in creating a problem domain model; and (3) how usage scenarios can be employed to motivate and coordinate the design implementation, refactoring and reuse of object-oriented software.

Computing environments which involve many interacting devices are a challenge for system and user interface designers. A prototype of a multiple-device application consisting of a personal digital assistant (PDA) that operates in conjunction with interactive television (ITV) was ...

Plans are underlying cognitive structures used by programmers to represent code. In two studies we examined the content of plan-based representations and sought to show that common representations are used for programs that instantiate the same plans, even when they perform different tasks and are written in different languages (Pascal or FORTRAN). Our results support plan-based models and show that the organizing structures for chunks of code are abstract programming goals. The same abstract structures are formed for programs that perform different tasks using the same plans and for programs written in different languages but using the same plans. While plans were the primary organizing structures for code representations, other task-related information also played a role suggesting that programmers really utilize multiple representations. We advocate viewing code comprehension more like a plan recognition process and less like a text comprehension process.

Page 1. HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION, 1985, Volume 1, pp. 283-307 Copyright 0 1985, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Exploring Exploring a Word Processor John M. Carroll and Robert L. Mack IBM Watson Research Center Clayton H. Lewis University of Colorado ...

Four experiments examined the conceptual organization of narrative passages and the extent to which these representations were explanatory in a variety of experimental tasks. The conceptual representation of a passage consisted of a graph of labeled nodes and labeled, directed arcs which were adopted from the Conceptual Dependency Theory. These representations included both explicitly stated information and inferences which had been empirically extracted by a question-answering procedure. Symbolic procedures for answering how- and why-questions were also delineated. The conceptual representations and the symbolic procedures that operate on these representations together accounted for 91% of the answers generated from question-answering protocols in Experiment 1, and also the rated quality of specific answers to specific questions in Experiment 2. Experiments 3 and 4 supported the hypothesis that structural properties of the representations can predict recall of explicitly stated nodes and verification ratings of inference nodes. The results provide encouraging support for the proposed graphic representations and also for the use of question-answering protocols in uncovering prose inferences.