Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5
Collaborative Cross-media Annotation of
Documents
The discussion of the affordances of paper (Section 1.1) has shown that one of the
main reasons for the longevity of paper is that paper documents can be easily anno-
tated. Annotations serve many different purposes. The following scenarios illustrate
some of them in our application domain:
Scenario 5 (Mobile annotation)
Before a lecture, Sally prints the lecture script,
which is distributed online by the instructor. During the lecture, she then makes
annotations on this script using her digital pen. She does not need a computer,
but only the digital pen and the printout. As she lives at some distance from the
university, she spends a considerable amount of time in public transport. On the
way home, she typically uses this time to review the contents presented during the
day. Using the digital pen, she marks up passages of the lecture script which are
particularly important or which she has difficulties understanding.
Scenario 6 (Active reading)
Sally has the task to read an article before the next
lecture. It is a challenging text, which has a complex structure and includes many
foreign words. Sally therefore works intensely on the text. During reading, she makes
annotations: She underlines key words and marks up important passages. She looks
up the signification of foreign words and annotates them with the corresponding
English terms. Moreover, she adds clarifying details and notes her own thoughts
and ideas concerning the text.
Scenario 7 (Reviewing annotations)
At home, she puts the pen into a reading de-
vice, which automatically transfers all pen data to the CoScribe client which runs
on Sally's computer. She then consults a textbook and completes the notes she has
made during the course. The pen is now used in live-mode, i.e. all data is available
in CoScribe in real time. As she has not well understood one particular slide, she
opens the CoScribe document viewer and reads the annotations that other students
have made on this slide.
In this chapter, we present a set of interaction techniques and visualizations for
cross-media annotation of documents. We contribute to the notable body of existing
research in two respects: First, we bring the layout of the annotation interface into
