Recently I came across this nice exploratory data analysis technique called stemplot. I like it because it seem a low-tech technique for data exploration. It has the advantage to retain the original data and order the data like in a histogram.

In statistics, a stemplot (or stem-and-leaf plot) is a graphical display of quantitative data that is similar to a histogram and is useful in visualizing the shape of a distribution. The are generally associated with the Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) ideas of John Tukey and the course Statistics in Society (NDST242) of the Open University, although in fact Arthur Bowley did something very similar in the early 1900s.

Typically, the leaf contains the last digit of the number and the stem contains all of the other digits. In the case of very large or very small numbers, the data values may be rounded to a particular place value (such as the hundreds place) that will be used for the leaves. The remaining digits to the left of the rounded place value are used as the stems.

Tags: data mining, statistics

Fabrice Hong is currently working in a visualization for ConceptGrid, one of the first CSCL script available on the ManyScript platform developed at CRAFT. In ConceptGrid, the students participate in an integrated learning activity pivoting on different social planes: an individual plane, a group plane and a class plane. Here is a nice summary of the theories behind.

Fabrice added some spice to the mix, offering a nice ‘spy tool’ for the teacher to look insight the group’s work. We tested the tool in the CSCW course I am TA’ing with 9 groups of 3-4 students. Each group had to read a couple of papers and then give a definition for 9 concepts. During the group phase, these concepts should be arranged in a 4×4 matrix. Whenever two confining cells of this matrix contained definitions then the students had also to assign a meaning to the relation between them.

Fabrice constructed then a 9×9 matrix where a cell is black whenever a definition for two concepts in that position were assigned a defined relation. He also added a cumulative view of the 9 grids.

Tags: collaboration tools, Computer Supported Collaborative Work, information metric, information visualization, research

Nicolas pointed me to this superb page containing a periodic table of visualization methods. The authors tried to define and compile existing visualization methods in order to develop a systematic overview based on the logic, look, and use of  the periodic table of elements.

In this paper, they describe the current fragmented state of the visualization field. Then they outline the rules and criteria they applied in conducting their research in order to present a revised periodic table of 100 visualization methods with a proposition how to use it.

Interestingly, in the same page it is possible to see two nice visualizations on software visualization in engineering and visualization studies. Both are of high interest for the work I did at Microsoft Research this last summer. Here a working draft.

Tags: information metric, information visualization, research, research methodology, reverse engineering, software visualization

P. G. Wojahn, C. M. Neuwirth, and B. Bullock. Effects of interfaces for annotation on communication in a collaborative task. In CHI98: Human Factors in Computing Systems, Conference Proceedings, pages 456–463, Los Angeles, CA, USA, April 18-23 1998. Association for Computing Machinery. [url]

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This paper present a solid study on the effect of annotation interface on collaborative writing. The authors compared three types of interfaces: a split screen interface, where the annotations are presented in a separated footnote-style panel; a interlinear interface, where comments are differenciated from the text through formatting features; and finally aligned interface where the annotations are visible “at-a-glance” horizontally aligned to the primary text with which they are associated, but in a distinct space in the margin.

The authors found that time on task did not vary significantly across conditions and did not interact with dependent measures. Additionally an LSD ANOVA indicated that those in the interlinear and aligned conditions communicated about significantly more problems than those in the split-scree condition. Also, subjects in these two conditions communicated about more equivocal problems than subjects in the split-scren condition.

They results were contrary to their hypothesis that interface effects would be greatest when problems are most difficult. The author pointed to a possible explaination for these results from the computer-mediated communication literature: humans compensate for greater communication difficulties not sacrificing the production of important ideas but communicating those ideas more tersely.

Tags: collaboration tools, collaborative writing, Computer Supported Collaborative Work, human computer interaction, interaction design

D. Suthers and J. Xu. Kükäkükä: An online environment for artifact-centered discourse. In Education track of the Eleventh World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2002), pages 472–480, Honolulu, HI, USA, May 7-11 2002. [url]

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This paper present Kukakuka, an environment for artifact-centered discourse (ACD) that was developed by the authors following the conclusions of several studies showing that linked ACD is more efficient that other forms of collaborative annotations. The evaluation of the system reported in the paper is extremely informal but presents interesting findings. Messages collected with this system are overwhelmingly “on task” with little topic drift. Second, the focus of the discussion is maintained as much by the ability to form a new thread centered on a new artifact as it is by the restriction that all messages within a thread are displayed along with the single artifact for that thread. The ability to handle multiple artifacts within a single discussion space is critical.

The paper also contains some nice background references for ACD applications and studies pointing out problems of threaded conversations.

Tags: collaboration tools, Computer Supported Collaborative Work, human communication, human computer interaction, interaction design, research, text data mining, user experience

M. Smith, J. J. Cadiz, and B. Burkhalter. Conversation trees and threaded chats. In CSCW ’00: Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, pages 97–105, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, New York, NY, USA 2000. ACM Press. [pdf]

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This paper presents ThreadedChat, a prototipe chat interface which structures the chat turns as a tree similar to Microsoft Windows Explorer. The elements of this structure are the threads, pockets of turns and responses.

According to the authors, a proper use of ThreadedChat eliminates the possibility of ruptured sequences of turns, one of the major usability problem of common chat application.

The user study did not reveal any significant effect in performances of ThreadedChat over a control application. However the authors claimed a significative effect in the turn balance.  Additionally the application was rated significantly worse than standard chat application as it breaked the flow of the conversation into many points of focus, with a consequent increase in the cognitive load.

Tags: human computer interaction, text data mining, usability, user experience

There is a new useful shortcut in the latest version of OSX. You can trigger Apple’s built-in dictionary in almost any system window, such as TextEdit, Safari, and Mail. This allows you to quickly get spelling and definitions for tens of thousands of words. To activate you need to hold down the command-control-d keys, all at the same time with your mouse over a word (the command key is the Apple key, next to the space-bar.)

The built in dictionary will pop up, as pictured below.

(via)

I also found a couple of interesting links of OSX shortcuts:

[1] Keyboard shortcuts in OS X;

[2] Top X keyboard shortcuts in OS X;

[3] Mac OS X Shortcuts! A Tiny Guide.

Tags: graphical user interface, hack, mac

This week I bought a copy of the Courrier International (N. 842-843, pp.54-57, 21st december 2006), a French Magazine which propose a selection of international articles translated. I was attracted by this article “Jamais sans mon mobile”. The original article published in AERA (Asahi Shimbun Extra Report and Analysis) is from ITAMI Kazuhiro (text) and TAKAI Masahiko (photos).

The authors made up an interestingly rich scenario, a day in life of this Ichiro Aera, where his mobile is the remote control of his life. The funny part is that the story looks extremely futuristic for Europeans but all the described technologies are already there: we are only missing some links and the market attention. In synthesis the mayor integrations of the mobile to the current technologies are seen in the following:

1. Payment methods;
2. Personal/pedestrian navigation;
3. Mobile office;
4. Personal entertainment (TNT media);
5. Internet of things connector;
6. Annotations sharing

 

I liked the article as we are always looking for nice scenarios. 🙂

Tags: field tools, human communication, human computer interaction, interaction design, new technology

Reading through the experientia web site I stumbled upon this article wrote by Michele Visciola and Mark Vanderbeeken on a broad evaluation of the usability of the e-government web sites. I find this extremely interesting but I still have to put my hands on the article itself. Here’s the abstract (my highlights).

For the first time in history, a wide distribution of technology allows citizens to get involved in public governance and participate in institutional life on a very regular basis. Yet websites of public authorities are barely taking advantage of the power of the participatory citizen. Two factors play a key role in this gap. First, the average citizen is not well informed about how basic democratic institutions function, which dramatically reduces the citizen’s capacity to influence the democratic process. Websites can help reduce the complexity of public institutions and get people to understand the way institutions and public administrations function and behave. Second, access to public services online is increasingly separated from institutional information. While online service sites are popular, the role of the institutional sites is not clear. The authors argue that these sites can and should take on the role of a two-way communications tool on topics of policy and politics, support knowledge sharing on areas covered by the authority, and create maximum transparency on what the public administration actually does. To better understand the opportunities, challenges, and evolutions that are affecting public institution websites, the authors studied the main sites of 30 public authorities and identified several innovative approaches. A first analysis shows that a lot remains to be improved. Almost all the sites analyzed share three characteristics: (1) policy priorities are not concisely communicated and easy to understand, (2) there is only limited innovation in how regional or municipal institutions present themselves; and (3) there are no tools for active participation.

However, some of the studied sites provide elements of innovation that can be used as models and inspirations. The authors conclude that to improve information access, better communication strategies are needed and to increase participation, better usability is of crucial importance.

The publisher web site selected public services portals (not covered in the study):

• Austria: www.help.gov.at
• Belgium: www.vlaanderen.be (in Dutch)
• Canada: www.seniorsinfo.ca, www.servicealberta.gov.ab.ca, www.serviceontario.ca
• Denmark: www.danmark.dk (in Danish)
• Finland: www.suomi.fi
• France: www.service-public.fr (in French)
• Ireland: www.oasis.gov.ie
• Italy: www.sistemapiemonte.it, www.italia.gov.it
• Netherlands: www.overheid.nl (in Dutch)
• Norway: www.norway.no
• Portugal: www.portaldocidadao.pt
• Singapore: www.ecitizen.gov.sg, my.ecitizen.gov.sg
• South-Korea: www.egov.go.kr (G4C—Government for Citizens)
• Spain: www.060.es (national, in Spanish), www.gencat.cat (Catalonia)
• Sweden: www.sverige.se (in Swedish)
• UK: www.direct.gov.uk
• USA: www.firstgov.gov

Tags: eGov, interaction design, politics, usability, user experience

I have been reading this paper of G. Stahl on group cognition in chat and methods for analyzing the interaction. One of the most interesting ideas is that of use threading between the messages to indicate the connections and implicit continuity within the sequence of contributions made by an individual. At the author notice:

In fact, the way that a response is taken is also part of the interaction itself. In discussing the building of “common ground,” Clark argues that shared understanding by A and B of A’s utterance involves not only B believing that he understands A, but also A believing that B understands (Clark & Brennan, 1991). This requires an interaction spanning at least multiple utterances. Thus, for instance, the most prevalent interaction in classroom discourse is when a teacher poses a question, a student provides an answer demonstrating understanding and then the teacher acknowledges the student response as such an understanding (Lemke, 1990). Here, the elemental cell of interactional meaning making is a sequence of contributions by at least two different people. It is clear that the meaning is constructed through the interaction of multiple people, and is not a simple expression of pre-existing mental representations in any one individual’s head.

Tags: data mining, research, research methodology, text data mining