Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Explicit Communication:
Enabling direct exchange of information through many
channels such as voice, gestures, and deictic references facilitates collaborative
work in general [73] as well as co-located collaboration [70]. It has been shown
that the ability to annotate data and share insights in a written way is an
essential part of the discovery process in distributed information visualization
settings [46]. This collaborative need for annotation exists in traditional use of
pen and paper based information as was observed in a study of teams working on
information analysis tasks in a shared setting [68]. However, in digital systems
messages of all types, written, voice, etc. might not always be as easily shared
and how best to support this will require further research.
Implicit Communication:
In co-located non-digital collaboration people are ac-
customed to gathering implicit information about team members' activities
through such things as body language, alouds, and other consequential commu-
nications. This is an active research area in distributed collaboration research
since the co-located evidence does not naturally become distributed. Co-located
collaboration benefits from many of the co-present advantages, however, issues
still arise. Some examples include: digital actions are not always readily visible
(cursors are hard to see on large screens), menu actions can affect a remote
part of the screen, as well as the general problems of change awareness [74].
Thus while implicit communications do support awareness in a co-located set-
ting already to some extent, some system changes made by a collaborator can
still remain unnoticed if the collaborative system does not provide appropriate
feedthrough (i. e. a reflection of one person's actions on another person's view).
In collaborative information visualization, for example, it might be important to
consider appropriate awareness for operations that make changes to the under-
lying dataset.
Imagine a co-located system in which each collaborator works in parallel on
a different view using a different file-system representation. If one collaborator
discovers an old version of a file and decides to delete it (a value operation
[23]), this change might go unnoticed if the other person is looking at a view
of the data that does not include the current file or it might be completely
surprising to the other person to see a file in their representation disappear.
Some research has proposed policies to restrict certain members from making
unsuspected global changes to a dataset [75]; however, while earlier research
on information visualization discussed the differences between view and value
operators (e. g. [23]), most recent research in multiple-view visualization tends
to favour view operations (filtering of unwanted data rather than deletion). This
seems likely to be most appropriate during collaboration.
It has also been shown the location and orientation of artifacts is used to
support implicit communication in non-digital settings providing information on
such things as who is working with which artifacts and when one person wants to
initiate communication about a particular artifact [53] and that this translates
to digital settings [54]. This consideration, providing for artifact mobility and
freedom orientation, will probably also be important in supporting information
visualization collaboration.
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