Information Technology Reference
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work. The knowledge worker chooses appropriate tools, combines them and uses
them in a way that best fits his or her current task. Note that this design is a di-
rect consequence of the ecological perspective. For instance, free-form annotations
support tasks such as taking notes during lectures, structuring documents, revising
documents, creating summaries or making excerpts. In each of these tasks, the user
creates other types and forms of annotations at other document positions. These var-
ious practices are possible because annotations can be of any shape and can be made
at arbitrary positions within documents. Another example of generic activities are
tags. These can be used for such different tasks as conceptually structuring a given
domain, defining priorities and to do items or marking up passages that a co-worker
should read.
The flexibility of CoScribe is best illustrated by giving examples of settings it
can be used in. As our application scenario, we choose learning at universities.
The paper-based practices of this application scenario are highly varied and rep-
resentative for a broad class of collaborative knowledge work settings. Practices
include taking notes and making annotations during courses, reviewing own notes
and shared notes of other learners, preparing for exams in learning group meetings,
excerpting documents, searching and integrating literature for preparing an article
or a term paper and even giving presentations by controlling the slide actually being
presented using a printout. Despite its wide applicability, CoScribe remains easy to
use, as it relies on a small set of simple, but generic interaction strategies, which are
inspired from traditional practices of working with paper documents.
Let us consider the following example scenario:
Scenario 1
Sally is a second-year university student and attends several lectures
and seminars. Her work is mainly based on documents, such as physical books,
sheets of paper containing her handwritten notes, printouts of web pages, digital
PDF articles and digital Web pages. While she often deeply engages with one sin-
gle document, for example for reading and understanding a complicated scientific
article, an important part of her work also consists of integrating contents from var-
ious sources to understand a problem domain. She often works on her own, but is
also frequently involved in collaborative settings, for example during the sessions of
seminars or in meetings with fellow students. She has various workplaces, working
at home, in lecture halls, at the library and even in public transport. Hence, the way
Sally works with documents and the contexts of this work are highly varied.
CoScribe supports all these forms of document work. In this and the following chap-
ters, this scenario will be used to illustrate CoScribe's functionality in the light of
practical examples.
4.2 Interaction Tools
CoScribe aims at a seamless integration of physical and digital documents. The main
interaction tool of CoScribe is a digital Anoto pen (see p. 29 ff. for a presentation
