This paper reports on a project to develop a "work in preparation" editor, or PREP editor, to study co-authoring and commenting relationships. As part of the project, we have identified three issues in designing computer support for co-authoring and commenting:(1) support for social interaction among co-authors and commenters; (2) support for cognitive aspects of co-authoring and external commenting; and (3) support for practicality in both types of interaction. For each of these issues, the paper describes the approach the PREP editor takes to address them. GOALS OF THE RESEARCHThe goal of this project is to develop a "work in preparation" (PREP) editor, a multi-user environment to support a variety of collaborative and, in particular, co-authoring and commenting relationships for scholarly communication. In our research, we do not focus on collaborations in which co-authors or commenters interact at the same time, though systems that support research into the issues such collaborations raise are clearly valuable [StefS7]. Our focus is on enhancing the effectiveness of loosely-coupled collaboration. We focus on co-authoring because it represents an interesting challenge for collaborative work over networks: co-authors, after all, must share a planning environment that often relies on, but is nonetheless richer than a working draft. We focus on commenting because it poses a challenge for communication within authoring groups as well as between external readers and such groups. We focus on scholarly communication because scholarly communities as they exist today are already collaborative work groups. They are not explicitly organized around single, concrete goals, but members of groups share the common goal of advancing the state of knowledge. Such work groups are organized in local settings, but they also interact intensively at a distance, as members of a common "invisible college" [Cran72]. ISSUES IN SUPPORTlNG CO-AUTHORING AND COMMENTINGThe PREP editor we are developing addresses three issues: (1) support for social interaction among co-authors and commenters; (2) support for cognitive aspects of coauthoring and external commenting; and (3) support for practicality in both types of interaction.

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This paper reports research to define a set of interaction parameters that collaborative writers will fmd useful. Our approach is to provide parameters of interaction and to locate the decision of how to set the parameters with the users. What is new in this paper is the progress we have made outlining task management parameters, notification, scenarios of use, as well as some implementation architectures.

Previous research indicates that voice annotation helps reviewers to express the more complex and social aspects of a collaborative writing task. Little direct evidence exists, however, about the effect of voice annotations on the writers who must use such annotations.To test the effect, we designed an interface intended to alleviate some of the problems associated with the voice modality and undertook a study with two goals: to compare the nature and quantity of voice and written comments, and to evaluate how writers responded to comments produced in each mode. Writers were paired with reviewers who made either written or spoken annotations from which the writers revised.The study provides direct evidence that the greater expressivity of the voice modality, which previous research suggested benefits reviewers, produces annotations that writers also find usable.Interactions of modality with the type of annotation suggest specific advantages of each mode for enhancing the processes of review and revision.

Previous work has demonstrated that presenting the data structures from programs in a graphical manner can significantly help programmers understand and debug their programs. In most previous systems, however, the graphical displays, called data visualizations, had to be laboriously hand created. The Amethyst system, which runs on Apple Macintosh computers, provides attractive and appropriate default displays for data structures. The default displays include the appropriate forms for literals of the simple types inside type-specific shapes, and stacked boxes for records and arrays. In the near future, we plan to develop rules for layout of simple dynamic data structures (like linked lists and binary trees), and simple mechanisms for creating customized displays. The visualizations are integrated into an advanced programming environment which is used to teach programming methodology at the introductory level.