Distributed collaborative writing

Abstract

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.

Challenges and Design Considerations for Multimodal Asynchronous Collaboration in VR

“…With a voice recording, message producers can leverage paralingual cues (e.g., inflection, pause timing, energy) for conveying equivocal and complex ideas [13]. Speech annotation/commenting, thanks to its rich, nuanced expressivity, has been widely adopted in different applications including online discussions [52] or document review [55]. Inspired by media richness theory [18] and the conceptual framework of deictic gestures [17], several multimodal annotation systems have tried to enrich communication and collaboration by combining multiple face-to-face inspired modalities, such as inking + speech [75,83], inking + gesture + speech [86], and video + hand gesture overlay [38].…”

“…collaborators express and understand nuanced, complex ideas effectively [13,55,87]. On the other hand, as Grudin pointed out, when consuming, browsing recorded speech can be tedious and slow for the consumer [34], and, when producing, it is known that multimodal recordings are harder to revise than text [72] and can provoke self-consciousness [1,52].…”

RichReview

“…Chalfonte and Kraut have also shown that spoken annotation's expressiveness and richness are more suitable for describing structural or semantic issues in comparison with written annotation [3,8]. Furthermore, Neuwirth et al found that speaking, when compared with writing, generates more detailed explanations and nuance that can lead to better perceptions of comments at the receiving end [16].…”

Bitter Sweet or Sweet Bitter?

“…In formal learning environments, instructors recommend the use of mitigating language, such as praise or affirmation, before or after negative feedback to improve its receptivity [2,4,16,23,37]. Similar techniques are less applicable in online environments, where the feedback is often composed by multiple independent providers and platform designers have limited control over the composition process.…”