Spatial hypertext and the practice of information triage

Abstract

Information triage is the process of sorting through relevant materials, and organizing them to meet the needs of the task at hand. It is a practice that has become increasingly common with the advent of "at your fingertips" information resources, To explore the characteristics of information triage and its interaction with spatial hypertext, a medium we claim supports the process, we have studied subjects engaged in a time-constrained decision-making task using a large set of relevant documents. We use the study task to investigate information triage under three different conditions: one in which the participants used paper documents, and two others in which the participants used variants of VIKI, a spatial hypertext system. Our findings suggest that during information triage attentional resources are devoted to evaluating materials and organizing them, so they can be read and reread as they return to mind. Accordingly, hypertext tools to support the practice should facilitate the rapid assimilation and assessment of new material, aid in the creation and management of a fluid category structure, allow readers to track their own progress through the information, and use minimum-effort methods to promote the intelligibility of results.

Supporting personal collections across digital libraries in spatial hypertext

“…Even when users felt there was little value in the visualization, they left the objects as is rather than repurposing color to express additional features of documents. This result is in sharp contrast to our earlier experiences when no initial visualization was provided [10]. In those experiences, color was used as frequently as collections to categorize documents.…”

“…VKB combines the flexible visual workspace found effective for expression in VIKI [10] with the representation and active support for incremental formalization of the Hyper-Object Substrate [17]. The next sections discuss characteristics of the workspace, integrated search, navigable history, and metadata authoring.…”

“…Observation of VKB use shows many people do searches and then move the URLs into VKB as part of information triage [10] and comprehension. Bypassing this effort would enable users to move more easily from location into comprehension and modification.…”

Information Scent, Searching and Stopping

“…Searchers could, for example, skim the SERP, examining the titles and/or URLs of visible results, before determining -through the process of information triage [17] -whether enough relevant content is present to examine them in more detail. By considering the SERP as a whole, this provides a way to model abandonment within the search process, rather than assuming that a searcher will assess the first snippet specifically.…”

Shaping the Ambience of Homes with Domestic Hypermedia

“…Spatial hypermedia systems ( [8], [15]) have been a source of inspiration, and we have extended spatial hypermedia with abstract representations (PlaceReps) of physical surfaces and places. A PlaceRep is associated with the composite which holds the collection of material to be presented according to the default behavior (specified by PresStyles).…”