In-Context Annotations for Refinding and Sharing

Annotations support understanding, interpretation, sensemaking and scannability. As valuable as in paper-based contexts, digital online annotations provide several benefits for annotators and collaborators. To further explore the real benefits of online annotations, we implemented a simple Web Annotation tool, SpreadCrumbs, to support our studies. The tool provides a simple annotation mechanism, simulating real-world paper-based annotations. In addition, the tool supports search, sharing capabilities and social navigation. We conducted a series of user studies that empirically demonstrates the benefits of “in-context” annotations for refinding and sharing.

Venue: WEBIST2010 (Selected Papers)

Authors: Ricardo Kawase, Eelco Herder, George Papadakis and Wolfgang Nejdl

PDF: kawase-webist-selected2010

The impact of bookmarks and annotations on refinding information

Refinding information has been interwoven with web activity since its early beginning. Even though all common web browsers were equipped with a history list and bookmarks early enough to facilitate this need, most users typically use search engines to refind information. However, both bookmarks and search based tools have significant limitations that impact their usability: the former are known to be hard to manage over the course of time, whereas the latter require the user to recall a specific combination of keywords or context. Most importantly, though, both are particularly inappropriate in cases where a piece of information is contained within an unstructured web page. In this paper, we present in-context annotation as a more efficient alternative to these methodologies. To verify this claim, we conducted a study in which we compare the performance of experienced users in all three approaches while revisiting specific pieces of information in the web after a long period of time. The outcomes suggest that in-context annotation clearly outperforms both traditional strategies.

Venue: HT2010

Authors: Ricardo Kawase, George Papadakis, Eelco Herder and Wolfgang Nejdl

PDF: kawase-ht2010

Annotations and Hypertrails with SpreadCrumbs – An Easy Way to Annotate, Refind and Share

Annotations have been shown to be an important activity during reading, especially during “active reading”. Annotations support understanding, interpretation, sensemaking and scannability. As valuable as in paper-based contexts, digital online annotations provide several benefits for annotators and collaborators. To study the impact of these benefits we present in this paper SpreadCrumbs, a straightforward Web annotation tool. SpreadCrumbs offers simple annotation’s interactions and metaphors that support most of the users’ annotations needs in the digital environment by enhancing the web experience with “in-context” annotations and providing a unique form of social navigation support with hypertrails. The results of our studies with the tool show the importance of annotations, the empirical outperformance of “in-context” annotations over other methods, and the outcome benefits of supporting social navigation.

Venue: WEBIST2010

Authors: Ricardo Kawase, Eelco Herder and Wolfgang Nejdl

A Straightforward Approach for Online Annotations: SpreadCrumbs – Enhancing and Simplifying Online Collaboration.

Countless user studies and everyday observations have shown that individuals make annotations while reading – highlighting, circling and underlining important parts of the text, moreover adding written comments. Since the Web became the biggest accessible source of information, many of the reading activities happens online in the browser. In this sense, it is expected that the individuals would keep their annotation behaviors, provided that the appropriate tools are available. Although several Web annotation projects currently exist, it is difficult to identify the most prominent in the field. With SpreadCrumbs, we simplify the annotations actions and the social navigation support. SpreadCrumbs users can add in-context annotations to any webpage with minimum cognition load, as they would do when reading a paper; in addition SpreadCrumbs enhances online collaboration and provides mechanisms to support social navigation by means of existing social networks. It allows the users to freely express themselves and to add any desirable substance to the resources. Technically, annotations carry valuable information about the content, more than bookmarks or tags, having a greater impact on collaboration and search for re-finding. SpreadCrumbs exploits all these advantages with an intuitive and easy-to-use user interface.

Venue:  WEBIST2009

Authors: Ricardo Kawase and Wolfgang Nejdl

PDF: kawase-webist2009a