Human-Information Interaction

Researchers

• Joan C. Durrance  Margaret Mann Collegiate Professor of Information
• Joseph Hardin  Clinical Assistant Professor
• Mark W. Newman  Assistant Professor
• Gary M. Olson  Professor Emeritus
• Judith S. Olson  Professor Emerita
• Soo Young Rieh  Associate Professor
• Terry E. Weymouth  Associate Research Scientist
• Elizabeth Yakel  Associate Professor

Current Projects

Past Projects

A Comparison of Web Searching and Web-Based Library Searching Behaviors Generally there is a fair understanding of how Web searches are conducted: queries and search sessions are brief, few Web pages are displayed, and Boolean operators and advanced features are rarely used. However, there is little understanding of why Web searches are very simple. This research explores whether people's perceptions of the Web's "easy-ness" may prevent them from becoming more effective Web searchers. The research examines the relationship among media expectation, effort invested into online searching, and search behavior by comparing those variables in the Web and Web-based library systems. The assumption is that people may have different expectations, perceiving the Web as an entertainment medium and the library system as an information retrieval system. This perception of the Web has led people to conduct very simple Web searches without attempting to learn effective search strategies or to gain system knowledge. Contact: Soo Young Rieh (rieh@umich.edu)

Access and Accessibility to Primary Sources The study examines the information-seeking patterns of researchers looking for primary sources on the Web and carries out a series of usability studies of archival MAchine Readable Catalog (MARC) records and Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aids. A related project focuses on academic reference librarians, who are gatekeepers to primary sources, and examines their strategies and abilities to locate archival materials on the Web. Contact: Beth Yakel (yakel@umich.edu)

Adaptive Indexing This work helped the vocabulary disagreement problem with an index that adapted to the user population vocabulary. It kept track of terms a user used in initially unsuccessful searches, and, subject to the the user's approval, installed those words as pointers to target the results the user finally found satisfying. This rapidly and dramatically improved recall for sets of objects where density of usage was high enough for users to benefit from each other's efforts. Contact: George Furnas (furnas@umich.edu)

Approaches for Understanding Community Information Use Researchers gather data to better understand the information-seeking behavior of consumers and to identify best practices in the provision of community information and community services. Contact: Joan Durrance (durrance@umich.edu)

Collaborative Augmentation of Knowledge Production Researchers study the cyclic processes by which the intellectual efforts of many people lead to the valuable accumulations of new knowledge. One familiar example is the "Document Lifecycle": people write books which go into libraries and are found and read by other people, some of whom write more books, etc. Another would be recommender systems where people see movies, give ratings to a software system that combines them with other peoples' ratings to make recommendations for other movies, which people see and rate, etc. The ultimate goal of this research is to devise ways to use information technology to create new social knowledge enhancement-cycles and to better support existing ones. Contact: George Furnas (furnas@umich.edu)

Community Connector The project served as a valuable resource for community networks and community information systems by maintaining an online journal, a major directory of community networks, a collection of relevant online articles and research, and many examples of projects and resources developed by nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and others arranged by topics of interest to communities. The Connector was designed and maintained by a team of School of Information students who worked with Professor Joan C. Durrance. Contact: Joan Durrance (durrance@umich.edu)

Creative Archiving at Michigan and Leeds: Emulating the Old on the New (CAMiLEON) A team of researchers at the University of Michigan and research staff in the United Kingdom from the Cedars project, being run at the universities of Leeds, Oxford, and Cambridge under the aegis of the Consortium of University Research Libraries, won funding from the National Science Foundation in the U.S. and the Joint Information Systems Committee in the UK for an international digital library intiative to investigate the potential role of emulation in long-term preservation of digital resources. The project developed a small suite of emulation tools, evaluated the costs and benefits of emulation as a preservation strategy for complex multi-media documents and objects, and developed models for collection management decisions to assist people in making real life decisions about how much effort and resources to invest in exact replication within preservation activity (as opposed to preserving raw intellectual content). The team developed preliminary guidelines for the use of different strategies (conversion, migration, and emulation) for managing and preserving digital collections. Contact: Margaret Hedstrom (hedstrom@umich.edu)

Developing Archival Metrics The project seeks to develop and establish standardized metrics and implement these through the development of evaluation tools. The adoption of standardized metrics to support the management and measure the impact of both analog and digital collections is a critical need in archives and manuscript collections. This project is connected with AX-SNet: Archival eXcellence in Information Seeking Studies Network. AX-SNet is an evolving international collaboration of researchers and institutions interested in facilitating accessible access to and use of primary sources, in exploring user information seeking and use behaviors, and in provision of user instruction and guidance. Researchers from the University of Michigan, the University of Toronto, and the University of North Carolina compose the core AX-SNet research team. Contact: Beth Yakel (yakel@umich.edu)

Educational Innovation: The Strategic Use of Complex Computer Systems This work builds on the researcher's understanding of how to teach students to be effective users of complex computer applications. The study includes the design and teaching of the inaugural first-year undergraduate course at the School of Information, SI 101, a course in information literacy. That course serves as a learning laboratory for comparing different types of strategic instruction in computer application use. Contact: Suresh Bhavnani (bhavnani@umich.edu)

Fisheye Views This work focused on how to make rational small views of large worlds, so as to give an appropriate balance of local detail and nested contexts. It used an analog to the fisheye camera lens that shows the whole world, but has higher magnification in the center of the lens and less around the edges. See Furnas, G. W., Generalized fisheye views. Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI '86 Conference Proceedings, Boston, April 13-17, 1986, 16-23. Contact: George Furnas (furnas@umich.edu)

How Libraries and Librarians Help This two-year study helped libraries nationwide evaluate and improve community information-based services for the public. The researchers designed a suite of Web-based evaluation tools that public librarians can use to measure the effectiveness of their digital community information services. The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded the project, which built on a previous IMLS grant, "Help-Seeking in an Electronic World." Contact: Joan Durrance (durrance@umich.edu)

Identification and Measurement of Patent Thickets As the rate of patenting has increased, so too has the problem of patent thickets, or dense webs of overlapping intellectual property rights that an organization must hack its way through in order to commercialize new technology. In certain industries characterized by cumulative innovations and multiple blocking patents, the existence of such densely concentrated patent rights can have the perverse effect of stifling innovation rather than encouraging it. One solution to the patent thicketing problem has been to form a patent pool, an organizational structure where multiple firms aggregate patent rights into a package for licensing. Such collaboration has often encountered difficulty from an antitrust standpoint, however, even when the formation of the pool was pro-competitive. Although recent antitrust guidelines have formally established that such collective ownership structures for intellectual assets could be pro-competitive in certain circumstances, a methodology for objectively identifying and measuring patent thickets has not been developed. Therefore, organizations find themselves enmeshed in such a thicket through an ex-post rather than an ex-ante examination of the surrounding patent space, and antitrust enforcement officials are unable to objectively identify patent thickets where clearing mechanisms such as patent pools might be pro-competitive. An analysis of modern patent pools, however, might provide substantial insight into the identification and measurement of patent thickets. Based on the premise that patent pools form where patent thickets are already present, we have identified a number of modern patent pools for analysis. Using a combination of network analytic techniques as well as visualization techniques, we hope to develop measures that can objectively identify patent thickets. Contact: Gavin Clarkson (gsmc@umich.edu)

Interactive Pixel Rewrite System (BITPICT) Despite the tremendous rise of visual representations in human interaction with computers, most of the underlying computation is still sentential -- based on traditional string languages. There are a number of dramatic but largely overlooked consequences of this. Our computational environments are confined to a restricted set of graphical forms, behaviors, interactions, algorithms, and problems -- namely those with simple sentential expression. This research develops graphical rather than the traditional sentential approaches to computer programming, sometimes called "thinking with pictures." In the interest of developing techniques for manipulating "rich" shapes onscreen that do not have easy algebraic generators, researchers explore pixel-rewriting rules that work directly on the raster (bitmap) representation of the shapes. They explore basic pixel rewrite algorithms and how they can be put together to achieve increasingly complex kinds of functionality. These in turn are used to create new kinds of pixel-based interaction. Researchers have also developed a new pixel match algorithm which they use to speed up execution. Contact: George Furnas (furnas@umich.edu)

Knowing More Than They Tell: Exploring the Tacit Knowledge Underlying an Archivist's Search Skills A description of this project is forthcoming. Contact: Denise Anthony (denisea@umich.edu)

Multiscale/Zoomable Interfaces The problem of scale presented by very large information worlds has led in recent years to a number of strategies in computer interfaces, including for example, fisheye viewers, the Perspective Wall, multiple-zoom viewers, and infinite interactive zoom viewers. Space-scale diagrams give a unifying framework for conceptualizing and visualizing these interfaces. Roughly analogous to space-time diagrams, they represent both space and magnification explicitly, have an interesting geometrical structure that allows the clear formulation of certain scale-related interface concepts, problems and solutions including: semantic zooming, multi-scale grids, fisheye views, and an interesting and practical analysis of optimal pan-zoom trajectories. See Furnas, George W. and Bederson, Benjamin B. Space-Scale Diagrams: Understanding Multiscale Interfaces. In Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI '95 Conference Proceedings, ACM, 1995, 234-241. Contact: George Furnas (furnas@umich.edu)

Query Reformulation in Web Searching This project investigates patterns and sequences of query reformulation based on query logs from a Web search engine. The data set contained only search sessions in which multiple query modifications were made. This project expands a preliminary study (Rieh & Xie, 2001) by enlarging the data set and expanding data analysis. The research has three objectives: to characterize the facets of query reformulation in Web searching; to identify patterns and sequences of query reformulation in Web searching; and to explore the ways in which search engines can support query reformulation more effectively in Web searching. Contact: Soo Young Rieh (rieh@umich.edu)

Sakai This community-source software development effort aims to design, build, and deploy a new Collaboration and Learning Environment for higher education. The project began in January 2004 and is a collaboration among the University of Michigan, Indiana University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University. The Open Knowledge Initiative and the uPortal consortium also play major roles. The project's primary goal is to deliver the Sakai application framework and associated content management tools and components that are designed to work together. These components are for course management, and, as an augmentation of the original content management model, they also support research collaboration. The software is designed to be competitive with the best content management software available and is being built by designers, software architects, and developers at different institutions, using an experimental variation of an open-source development model called the community source model. Contact: Joseph Hardin (hardin@umich.edu)

SEMNET This early work explored the use of 3D for laying out a graph structure, in this case a semantic network. See Fairchild, K.M., Poltrock, S.E. and Furnas G.W., SEMNET: Three-Dimensional Graphic Representations of LargeKnowledge Bases. in Guindon, R. (Ed.) Cognitive Science and Its Applications for Human Computer Interaction, Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawerence Erlbaum, 1988, 201-233. Contact: George Furnas (furnas@umich.edu)

Statistical Semantics Researchers documented the degree to which people disagree on the choice of words they use to name, describe, and index things in a wide variety of contexts (e.g., two people are likely to assign the same single word to things only 5-15 percent of the time). It then explored the implications for various vocabulary driven information technology systems, ranging from information retrieval to command languages. See Furnas, G.W., Landauer, T.K., Gomez, L.M., Dumais, S. T., The vocabulary problem in human-system communication. Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, 30 (11), Nov 1987, pp. 964-971. Contact: George Furnas (furnas@umich.edu)

U-M Digital Library Advanced User-Interface Group: NaviQue Information Gathering Environment (NaviQue) What are basic desiderata of information gathering environments? In what different ways can we combine navigation-based and query-based access (NAVI+QUE)? Researchers developed design considerations for the construction of advanced information environments, and a prototype interface that attempted to respond to them. The design considerations came from task analyses of information gathering activities, from changes in the global information environment, and from advances in human-computer interaction. These led to a number of desired design properties that guided the prototyping efforts, including a system called NaviQue, a visually rich environment for information gathering and organizing based on a navigable, fractal structure of information, ubiquitous queriability, lightweight interaction with ad hoc sets, and information visualization. The resulting interaction paradigm smoothly integrated more than a half dozen synergies between querying, navigation, and organization. Contact: George Furnas (furnas@umich.edu)