Papers by Gary Marchionini
Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2009
The changing nature of information and evolving role of information sources have made it possible... more The changing nature of information and evolving role of information sources have made it possible for almost anyone to be a consumer as well as a producer of information. Thus, many information services are focused on user participation and support different user roles. It has become essential for information scientists, social analysts, and digital library curators to recognize and study these social factors while analyzing the content of these information sources. In this paper we present these ideas in the light of our work with collecting and analyzing election videos from YouTube. Over the course of more than 8 months and 200 passes of data collection, we have gathered about 15000 videos along with nearly two dozen attributes for each video relating to US presidential elections 2008 from YouTube. Using this collection, we demonstrate how various social attributes such as tags, ratings, and comments can be used to detect significant trends, people, and events. This detection can...
Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, 2006
In this poster, we describe the study of an interface technique that provides a list of suggested... more In this poster, we describe the study of an interface technique that provides a list of suggested additional query terms as a searcher types a search query, in effect offering interactive query expansion (IQE) options while the query is formulated. Analysis of the results shows that offering IQE during query formulation leads to better quality initial queries, and an increased uptake of query expansion. These findings have implications for how IQE should be offered in retrieval interfaces.
This report develops a conceptual framework for text ltering practice and research, and reviews p... more This report develops a conceptual framework for text ltering practice and research, and reviews present practice in the eld. Text ltering is an information seeking process in which documents are selected from a dynamic text stream to satisfy a relatively stable and speci c information need. A model of the information seeking process is introduced and specialized to de ne information ltering. The historical development of text ltering is then reviewed and case studies of recent w ork are used to highlight important design characteristics of modern text ltering systems. Speci c techniques drawn from information retrieval, user modeling, machine learning and other related elds are described, and the report concludes with observations on the present state of the art and implications for future research on text ltering.
The Craft of Information Visualization, 2003
The University of Maryland at College Park in cooperation with Baltimore City Public Schools and ... more The University of Maryland at College Park in cooperation with Baltimore City Public Schools and several partners is working to build an electronic learning community that provides teachers with multimedia resources that are linked to outcome-oriented curriculum guidelines. The initial resource library contains over 1000 videos, texts, images, web sites, and instructional modules. Using the current system, teachers can explore and search the resource library, create and present instructional modules in their classrooms, and communicate with other teachers in the community. This paper discusses the iterative design process and the results of informal usability testing. Lessons learned are also presented for developers.
The Information Retrieval Series, 2011
ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, 2006
This paper reports the results of work in the final no-cost extension year of a digital governmen... more This paper reports the results of work in the final no-cost extension year of a digital government project that developed user interface models and prototypes to help people find and understand government statistics; proposed a Statistical Knowledge Network architecture that supports cross agency information access; and demonstrated models for governmentacademic collaboration.
CHI '07 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2007
The model of search as a turn-taking dialogue between the user and an intermediary has remained u... more The model of search as a turn-taking dialogue between the user and an intermediary has remained unchanged for decades. However, there is growing interest within the search community in evolving this model to support search-driven information exploration activities. So-called " exploratory search" describes a class of search activities that move beyond fact retrieval toward fostering learning, investigation, and information use. Exploratory search interaction focuses on the user-system communication essential during exploratory search processes. Given this user-centered focus, the CHI conference is an ideal venue to discuss mechanisms to support exploratory search behaviors. Specifically, this workshop aims to gather researchers, academics, and practitioners working in human-computer interaction, information retrieval, and other related disciplines, for a discussion of the issues relating to the design and evaluation of interfaces to help users explore, learn, and use information. These are important issues with far-reaching implications for how many computer users accomplish their tasks.
CHI '01 extended abstracts on Human factors in computer systems - CHI '01, 2001
The question at hand: The question we should try to avoid: What is "information architecture" any... more The question at hand: The question we should try to avoid: What is "information architecture" anyway? Can the quality of an information architecture be assessed in a quantitative fashion?
Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries, 2007
Communications of the ACM, 2001
ABSTRACT
the Proceedings of International Web Archiving …, 2007
Online digital video hosting and sharing sources are becom-ing increasingly popular. People are n... more Online digital video hosting and sharing sources are becom-ing increasingly popular. People are not only uploading and viewing videos at these sites, but are also discussing them. In addition to the comments, visitors also rate and link these videos. Statistics about ...
… of North Carolina at Chapel Hill …, 2007
International Conference on Digital Government Research, May 18, 2003
A table object, defined and described in XML, is treated as the basic unit in a free-link topolog... more A table object, defined and described in XML, is treated as the basic unit in a free-link topology that enables multiple inheritances for each node. In this paper, a novel table navigation system called TableHunter is introduced. Each table object is presented in the TableHunter as a node of a map structure, and supports a context+focus view.
Digital Library Use, 2003
Digital libraries (DL) serve communities of people and are created and maintained by and for peop... more Digital libraries (DL) serve communities of people and are created and maintained by and for people. People and their information needs are central to all libraries, digital or otherwise. All efforts to design, implement, and evaluate digital libraries must be rooted in the information needs, characteristics, and contexts of the people who will or may use those libraries. Like most principles, the devil is in the details-implementing and applying the principle to practical problems. Human-centered digital library design is particularly challenging because human information behavior is complex and highly context dependent, and the digital library concept and technologies are rapidly evolving. Two important aspects of human-centered design are assessing human information needs and the tasks that arise from those needs and evaluating how the digital library affects subsequent human information behaviors. Given the evolving nature of digital library development, solutions to these challenges must be process-oriented and iterative rather than product-oriented and summative. Given the complexity of human information needs and the uncertainty about the effects of new systems, a multiplicity of data views is essential to guide design and understand the impact of digital libraries. This chapter focuses on two elements of design-assessing information needs and ongoing evaluation of impact. Multifaceted approaches to needs assessment and evaluation of digital libraries are illustrated with three case studies, with particular emphasis on a users needs assessment conducted as part of a project to develop prototype interface designs for the Library of Congress National Digital Library Program. The human-centered design principle above links three clusters of constructs: people and their needs, characteristics, and contexts; design, implementation, and evaluation; and digital libraries. How will the new system change needs (and tasks)? How do impacts influence future generations and systems? Design, implementation and evaluation. Design, implementation, and evaluation are processes that marshal intellectual and physical capital to yield tangible, usable, and testable products. The design process is of primary concern to architects, engineers, and inventors and there is a significant body of literature devoted to theory (e.g., Braha and Maimon, 1997; Simon, 1996), history (e.g., Petroski, 1996), and practice (e.g., Brooks, 1975; Norman, 1988). Computer system designers have begun to consider the human factors (physical and psychological) associated with system usage and there is a growing recognition of the importance of user-centered design for systems used by general populations. This approach is increasingly adopted by practicing software designers. Hix &Hartson (1993) offer many practical suggestions for assessing the tasks that users bring to computer systems and Shneiderman (1998) provides a rationale for mapping user tasks and needs onto the syntax and semantics of interface designs. Marchionini (1995) provides a framework for mapping users, tasks, and information need settings onto interface designs. Implementation issues follow design and much of the work libraries do to digitize collections, provide access, and insure interoperation advances practice by demonstrating "how to" procedures. In the ideal, the design specifications are perfect, the work goes smoothly, and the project comes in on time, on cost, and includes all and only the functionality defined in the specifications. In practice, systems contain a variety of workarounds, add new features, and do not include all functions in the specifications. In spite of efforts to build a science of design, iterative design informed by evaluation feedback is more typical. Evaluation may be a research genre aimed at assessing classes of techniques or methods (e.g., Suchman, 1967 for social programs; Flagg, 1990 for educational technology), or a systematic assessment of a specific product for the purposes of improvement (e.g., Nielsen, 1993). Summative product testing is another form of evaluation that is not applicable to complex and evolving concepts like digital libraries. A human-centered approach to design, implementation and evaluation is fundamentally complicated by the variability in human characteristics and behavior. See Harter & Hert (1997) for a recent review of evaluation research in information retrieval. Evaluation of a digital library may serve many purposes ranging from understanding basic phenomena (e.g., human information-seeking behavior) to assessing the effectiveness of a specific design to insuring sufficient return on investment. Human-centered evaluation serves many stakeholders ranging from specific users and librarians to various groups to society in general. Additionally, evaluation may target different goals ranging from increased learning and improved research to improved dissemination to bottom line profits. Each of the evaluation goals may also have a set of measures and data collection methods. Finally, the evaluation must have a temporal component that can range from very short terms to generations. One approach to this evaluation complexity is presented in the Perseus DL case below.
We present in this paper the design and an evaluation of a novel interface called the Relation Br... more We present in this paper the design and an evaluation of a novel interface called the Relation Browser++ (RB++) for searching and browsing large information collections. RB++ provides visualized category overviews of an information space and allows dynamic filtering and exploration of the result set by tightly coupling the browsing and searching functions. A user study was conducted to compare the effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction of completing various types of searching and browsing using the RB++ interface and a traditional formfillin interface for a video library. An exploration set of tasks was also included to examine the effectiveness of and user satisfaction with the RB++ when applied to a large federal statistics website. The comparison study strongly supported that RB++ was more effective, efficient, and satisfying for completing data exploration tasks. Based on the results, efforts to automatically populate the underlying database using machine learning techniques are underway. Preliminary implementations for two large-scale federal statistical websites have been installed on government servers for internal evaluation.
Proceedings of the 26th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in informaion retrieval, 2003
Four statistical visual feature indexes are proposed: SLM (Shot Length Mean), the average length ... more Four statistical visual feature indexes are proposed: SLM (Shot Length Mean), the average length of each shot in a video; SLD (Shot Length Deviation), the standard deviation of shot lengths for a video; ONM (Object Number Mean), the average number of objects per frame of the video; and OND (Object Number Deviation), the standard deviation of the number of objects per frame across the video. Each of these indexes provides a unique perspective on video content. A novel video retrieval interface has been developed as a platform to examine our assumption that the new indexes facilitate some video retrieval tasks. Initial feedback is promising and formal experiments are planned.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2004
This paper argues that a new paradigm for information retrieval has evolved that incorporates hum... more This paper argues that a new paradigm for information retrieval has evolved that incorporates human attention and mental effort and takes advantage of new types of information objects and relationships that have emerged in the WWW environment. One aspect of this new model is attention to highly interactive user interfaces that engage people directly and actively in information seeking. Two examples of these kinds of interfaces are described.
Proceedings of the 12th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia, 2004
Three video search systems were compared in the interactive search task at the TRECVID 2003 works... more Three video search systems were compared in the interactive search task at the TRECVID 2003 workshop: a text-only system, which searched video shots through transcripts; a features-only system, which searched video shots through 16 video content features (e.g., airplanes and people); and a combined system, which searched through both transcripts and content features. 36 participants each completed 12 video search tasks. The hypothesis that the combined system would perform better than both the text-only and the features-only systems was not supported, and large topic effects were found. Further analysis showed that concept-based video retrieval worked best for specific topics, whereas the hybrid retrieval techniques which combine both concept-and content-based video retrieval showed some advantage when searching for generic topics. The results have implications for topic/task analysis for video retrieval research, and also for the implementation of hybrid video retrieval systems. Categories and Subject Descriptors H. 3. 1. [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Content analysis and indexing-indexing methods.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2002
In a digital environment, it is feasible to integrate multimedia materials into a library collect... more In a digital environment, it is feasible to integrate multimedia materials into a library collection with ease. However, it seems likely that non-textual surrogates for multimedia objects, e.g., videos, could effectively augment textual representations of those objects. In this study, five video surrogates were evaluated in relation to their usefulness and usability in accomplishing specific tasks. The surrogates (storyboards with text or audio keywords, slide shows with text or audio keywords, fast forward) were created for each of seven video segments. Ten participants, all of whom watch videos at least monthly and search for videos at least occasionally, viewed the surrogates for seven video segments and provided comments about the strengths and weaknesses of each. In addition, they performed a series of tasks (gist determination, object recognition, action recognition, and visual gist determination) with three surrogates selected from those available. No surrogate was universally judged "best," but the fast forward surrogate garnered the most support, particularly from experienced video users. The participants expressed their understanding of video gist as composed of three components: topicality, the story of the video, and the visual gist of the video. They identified several real-world tasks for which they regularly use video collections. The viewing compaction rates used in these surrogates supported adequate performance, but users expressed a desire for more control over surrogate speed and sequencing. Further development of these surrogates is warranted by these results, as well as the development of mechanisms for surrogate display.
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Papers by Gary Marchionini