Gary Marchionini - US grants

Adaptive information systems promise to augment human information seeking by cooperating with users to manage the cognitive burden of the search. Highly interactive (hypertext) systems for brows- ing databases can promote natural, low-cognitive load search strategies. Still lacking, however, is a scientific basis for designing user-oriented organizations of data or user-oriented views of database content. This research seeks to test aspects of a theory of information seeking which can explain users' interactions with machines to find information. In particular, through experimental analysis of such interactions it examines users' development and application of mental models of hypertext systems employed for that purpose. The research will contribute to an emerging theory of information seeking in electronic environments, guide designers of adaptive information systems, and facilitate the development of methods and materials for human information seeking.

EIA-9976640
Marcionini, Gary
Liddy, Elizabeth D.
University of North Carolina @ Chapel Hill

Digital Government: Citizen Access to Government Statistical Data

This proposal will conduct research to improve the location/retrieval, reading, navigation and manipulation of tabular statistical data from Federal agencies. These data cover many different domains (e.g., health, labor, transportation), of interest to professionals in the field and to citizens. This work will be accomplished through collaboration with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Energy Information Agency, the National Center for Health Statistics and the Bureau of Census. In addition to the Federal agencies, the partnership includes researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, Syracuse University, the University of Maryland and Textwise, a commercial company.

This is the first year funding of a three year continuing award. This project will afford people agile views - effortless control over different representations - for digital video objects, by providing a multiplicity of indexes that are attuned to people's experiences, leverage the features of the content, and are easily and rapidly used and changed. The PI will specify such an interface, create prototype instantiations, and develop and apply procedures for testing the usability of the prototypes and specifications. Most research on digital video systems focuses on the retrieval of specific objects and on one or a few indexing attributes. This project is unique in three ways. First, it aims to address tasks at the collection level as well as at the item level; thus, in addition to the retrieval task, it aims to help people understand a video collection's structure, what is and is not available, and what attributes might be useful for retrieval purposes. Second, it aims to provide people with a range of surrogates and to integrate these into an effective and efficient interface; it aims to create an environment that provides multiple surrogates at the collection level as well as at the individual item level, and to provide novel control mechanisms to manage these alternatives. Third, it aims to assess user performance on these different tasks using these surrogates; evaluating browsing behavior is a challenge in any medium, and this work will build upon tasks and metrics developed in previous studies to go beyond traditional metrics to address time-benefit tradeoff measures. For this project, the video objects will be drawn from the Open Video Repository. Surrogates such as key-frames (in slide shows, storyboards, and skims), audio extracts, and keywords will be used as the basic representa-tions for specific video segments, and will be user-manipulable through a variety of interaction mechanisms. Additional surrogates (such as two-dimensional layouts of metadata and coordinated metadata lists) for collections of videos will also be developed, and additional views, i.e., histories (reviews), peripheral views, and shared views, will also be investigated within the agile views environment. The usability of the agile views environment (its individual components and the completely-integrated interface) will be evaluated iteratively, concluding with assessments of user performance (object and action recognition, and video comprehension), tradeoffs associated with viewing compaction rates, and user satisfaction with the interface. These evaluation techniques will themselves contribute to research and development by providing metrics and techniques for assessing interactive browsing. The ultimate goal of this work is to provide an information-rich and interactive environment that enables people to go beyond their innate visual and audio abilities to browse video content and process large volumes of video information.

EIA-0131824
Gary J. Marchionini
Stephanie Haas
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

Digital Government: Collaborative Research: Integration of Data and Interfaces to Enhance Human Understanding of Government Statistics - Toward the National Statistical Knowledge Network

This award will support collaborative research with several Federal statistical agencies to develop better statistical data models, to explore the use of SML, to develop better map-querying tools and to integrate other available tools for manipulating, browsing and visualizing tabular data. The goal is to develop better human/computer interfaces for expert users to novices, to increase general statistical literacy, and to provide seamless access to data held by multiple Federal agencies and agencies at other levels of government, in particular state and local data.

Intellectual Merit

Digital preservation stands as one of the grand challenges of the early 21st Century. National libraries and archives from around the world are grappling with the preservation of digital assets. Funding agencies worldwide recognize the preservation imperative and are funding a wide array of research and development projects. As digital libraries and digitization initiatives have grown over the past decade, an increasing number of researchers, information professionals, and policy makers have addressed the issues around creating, maintaining, and, most recently, preserving digital objects. Although most of the preservation research to date has centered on text and still images, video is becoming a more common medium of expression for science and education and offers unique preservation challenges. This project builds on earlier work with digital video files and their surrogates (http://www.open-video.org), seeking ways in which to preserve a video work's context and highlighting its essence, thus making it more understandable and accessible to future generations. Long-term provision of contextualized access that makes digital objects understandable over time is essential to longterm preservation. This project will focus on developing a preservation framework for digital video context that can be used by archivists to make preservation decisions and guide the development of finding aids.The work will include a demonstration of this framework by applying it to two important digital video collections: the complete series of NASA broadcast educational videos and the complete set of juried ACM SIGCHI videos presented at annual conferences from 1983 to the present. The framework and demonstrable examples using the test collections will be made available to inform video archival decisions in the immediate years ahead.

Broader Impacts

This work will have several important outcomes for a variety of stakeholders. First, it will address the important context aspect of digital preservation on both theoretical and practical fronts. This should improve archival decision making and finding aid creation and suggest ways to leverage technology further to make them more efficient and effective. Second, this work will define preservation parameters for digital video, an increasingly important medium that has to date received little attention. Third, this work will have high payoff by focusing attention on two important and substantial collections of video content. These collections are already used in analog or broadcast forms by millions of students and teachers (NASA) and in analog or digital local forms by thousands of human-computer interaction students and faculty. The NASA videos in particular were created to encourage women and minority participation in science and broader and more effective availability will enhance this mission.. Fourth, this project will bring together diverse communities of practice ranging from academics in multiple disciplines to publishers to educational technologists. The synergies such crossdisciplinary collaborations offer will not only result in a more robust framework for preservation but will also produce better understanding of digital preservation issues across these different communities. Finally, this project will have substantial impact because it is tuned to the requirements of a new and innovative funding model.

The goal of this research is to develop techniques and systems that help people solve information problems that are complex, general, or ongoing and when information seeking takes place over multiple intervals or in collaboration with other people. The approach is to first study how people seek information and interpret results of searches as they use multiple systems over time and in collaboration with emphasis given to managing and optionally sharing result sets and items. Second, based on these initial investigations, systems are designed that support dynamic search and visualization and can serve both as a personal information manager and a group information manager. Third, these tools are evaluated in field and laboratory settings. The research is linked to educational theories of active learning and is embedded in university student and research team information needs over multiple months. Students play an active role in this project by participating in the design and evaluation of the information seeking systems.

The results of this research will provide guidance for designers of the next generation of systems that support a full range of complex information seeking needs. The project also contributes specific open source tools that people can easily adopt as plug-ins to popular web browsing software. Publications, software and other information items will be widely disseminated, including via the project Web site (http://www.ils.unc.edu/infoseek/). This work will thus have broad impact on Internet-based information activities in schools, homes, offices, and research laboratories.

information such as facts or pointers to rich information resources are well met. However, support for the more difficult challenges of information seeking is not provided by the current search engines. There are only a few models of human behavior or practical support tools for open-ended, exploratory, discovery-oriented, or recall-oriented tasks that depend as much on results examination and interpretation as on query specification. Meeting the needs of people who seek information to discover and learn is a grand challenge, and the tools and services needed to meet this challenge will be fundamental to the emerging cyberinfrastructure. The time and conditions are right to develop the theory, techniques, and tools to support such information seeking needs. This two-day workshop aims to bring together leaders in information retrieval, library and information science, and human-computer interaction to shape the short- and long-term agenda for research to support information seeking. In particular the workshop focuses on the following three themes: (i) Understanding / modeling exploratory search behavior; (ii) Providing system support for exploratory search; and (iii) Evaluating systems to support exploratory search.

This workshop will have impact on the emerging information seeking research and development community by defining directions for short, mid, and long-term research. Workshop results will be widely disseminated via the workshop website (http://www.ils.unc.edu/ISSS_workshop/). It can be foreseen that general population of WWW users will benefit from this effort, as better tools and services to support information needs for ongoing work and learning will be developed. These results will also impact diversity in the IT research and development area by opening up this area to underrepresented students, researchers and practitioners.

The value of social computing environments has been demonstrated in many contexts, including web search, shared bookmarking and photo sharing, personal social networking, online support groups, and information resources such as Wikipedia. Collaborative game environments have been used as both research environments to study collaboration and as environments for facilitating scientific meetings, and professional organizations and scientific communities also leverage cyberinfrastructure and social network applications to share resources, collect data, and facilitate communication. Virtual worlds have also been applied to support a diverse range of professional and work activities, however, there is so far little empirical evidence on how virtual worlds are adopted and leveraged to promote scientific progress. The exploratory research proposed here aims to explore how virtual worlds can be leveraged in the digital curation community for purposes of improving work practices and training.

This award supports the NSF Workshop: Data Curation: Ensuring Quality and Access to Enable New Science, to be held in September 2012 in Arlington, VA. The value of data to the global economy has been well-documented and spawned calls for training professionals who practice data curation and stewardship, data analytics, and "big data" management. It is evident that poor data is worse than no data because it wastes time, leads to poor science and decisions, and diminishes trust in the entire data enterprise. Data curation demands tools and techniques at each phase of the data life cycle that lead to effective and efficient data services that people trust. This workshop brings together leading researchers in data curation to establish a research agenda to guide development of these tools and techniques.

This workshop will have impact on the emerging data curation research and development community by defining directions for tools and techniques that support selection, metadata annotation, storage, access, use and reuse, and preservation of scientific and scholarly data. Such tools and techniques will make science and scholarship more effective and may be adapted to personal data management applications such as personal health or educational records. The workshop web site (http://datacuration.web.unc.edu/) provides will be used to disseminate further information, including the resulting workshop report that will provide a roadmap for the future data curation research and follow-up activities.