Interaction: Beyond Retrieval
Looking beyond current state of keyword searching and hyperlink browsing.
Open ended inquiry, complex decision making, how do we go from here
Conceptualizing interaction – Karl Fast
Jigsaw puzzles
You sort, you rearrange, you have different strategies, whole pictures, or small sections etc
Path to completion is not a straight line, instead is a more chaotic path.
If it were a straightline path, we would want to minimize the number of interactions. Any step off that path would be a mistake. This is obviously not the way the world works
What is interaction?
Does interaction have epistemic value?
Do we need more interaction, not less?
We make a distinction between Micro and Macro level interaction
Action and reaction are coupled together to create interaction.
Knowledge in the head and knowledge in the world.
Interaction can serve as a epistemic extension of representations.
Many different kinds of interactions
Task based micro level interactions
Animating Filtering Annotating fragmenting chunking probing Cloning
Interaction versus interaction technique
Descriptive framework, not a prescriptive framework.
Invent = Interactive Visual ENvironmenTs
Representations activities
Digital Objects <> interactions <> Actors
Ecologies
Fast & Sedig (2005) examining the role of information visualization in the reconceptualization of digital libraries. Journal of Digital Information
http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/jodi-169/69karl.fast@pobox.eduFrom Information Seeking to Sensemaking
Yan Qu – University of Maryland
Dervin’s Sensemaking Model
Situation
Help Gap
Needs (gap)
Use Bridging
How do people express their needs?
Structural information Need
Need
Produce a TV program Iron Chef
Sub needs
Learn about different cuisines
Where to find good chefs
Sub sub needs
Learn about French Cuisine
Understand position in Hierarchy in a kitchen
Information need is not a single need – there are rich structures within a single need
How can an information system help users to manage a set of structured needs?
Purpose of Knowledge gaining
Where do people obtain structure ideas when building knowledge representation in an information sekeing task? Existing knowledge structures from other people’s sensemaking process
How do people comprehend a large textual dataset?
Different stages and activities involved in information comprehension
Users behavior shaped the cost structure of interactions
New focus of information seeking study
To support he creation of representations for external explict knowledge
To build interactions
yanqu@umd.eduInteraction
Interaction is a kind of action that occurs as tow ir more objhects have an effect upong one another
Only content has effect on the user
Is this what I want?
Did I ask the right question?
Now, I know a bit more . . .but
How do we interact with content?
We still need the system and interface
We need to understand the difference between interacting with system or interface
Interacting with content is much more difficult and much more important.
Interact with interface
Anticipation
Autonomy
Consistency
Exploratory
Interact with content
- Help me think
- Choose an effective representation structure
- help people think about the content they are seeing
Guide the user through dynamic content structure
Make best use of interactive tools
Examples
AuthorMap
Visual Content explorer
Example Author Search
Why do we limit author searching to author string matching
What other content will help the user?
The number of dovuments the author ahthored
Subjects of those documents
Related authors
Relationships of those authors
Subject areas of those authors
Showed a content map of authors to demonstrate the relationship between authors
Dynamic concept prepresentaiton
Studied from a poing to view of networks
Built upon recent discoveries in the science of netwoeks
Naturally occurred hubs
Design for interacting with content will be different than system interfaces
Research and prototypes are needed to explore in this direction
Towards a more intergrated model for IR
Berrypicking model (Bates 1990)
Ir is an evolving process
User interfaces for Ir should support multiple concepts
It becomes diffcult to:
maintain query context,
maintain task context
manage information objects systematically
More integrated IR environment to support advanced IR tasks.
Need more collaboration between IR and HCI communities
Interaction with content with natural language in an integrated environment
Why Natural Language
It is natural?
Handles complexity
People don’t use Boolean / formal query languages
Visualization techniques are not generic
So we need robots, something that understands us
How can we help the machines
Organize our data
Share our knowledge
- telling them is hard
- answering their questions is easier
XML to organize our knowledge –
Interactive dialog with machine
Machine can’t understand everything, so aim for what they can, then make them ask for help.
Collaboration
People – machines
People – people
Integrate with domain knowledge
Integration with visualization
Integration with full text techniques