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4. Defining the scope of an annotation, link or tag. This is the portion of the doc-
ument (or of several documents) it applies to. In the literature, the scope of an
annotation is often referred to as its context. The scope of a link is called its
anchor.
Conceptual activities can be hierarchically organized. For instance, scope selec-
tion is a sub-activity of the three other activities. Creating a hyperlink includes the
sub-activity of selecting the passage of a document the hyperlink applies to. We
might also define higher-level activities. For example, the activity of “excerpting on
a separate sheet of paper” relies both on annotation and on linking.
3.4.2 Syntactic Level of Interaction: Core Interactions
The syntactic level encompasses interaction primitives of PPUIs. These interaction
primitives are independent of the functionality of the PPUI. Instead, they model in
a generic way how users interact with pen and paper. Our interaction primitives are
based on observations of pen-and-paper practice we made in several field studies
[145, 144, 143, p. 19 sqq.]. We identified the following three main categories of
interaction:
The first category consists of writing and drawing with a pen on paper (e.g. anno-
tations, handwritten references, keywords or symbols for tags). People often parti-
tion the available space into separate zones for different functionality, e.g. reserving
the left or right margins of the document for keywords in order to provide for a quick
overview on all keywords on a page. A second category involves leveraging the ma-
terial aspect of paper sheets, which can be flexibly moved and arranged in physical
space. Specific spatial arrangements of two or more paper sheets convey semantics
(e.g. relating documents by putting them into a folder or placing them on a stack,
or marking important pages with bookmark stickers). Moreover, the shape of phys-
ical paper sheets can be modified, e.g. by bending or folding a sheet of paper, or by
tearing it into several pieces. Finally, we frequently observed that people pointed to
documents. This occurs most often in collaborative settings, but also when a single
person reads on his or her own, for instance during intense reading or for temporarily
marking a passage. Often people do not only point to one single document but con-
secutively point to several documents or several pages. This allows them to express
relations between the contents they point to.
Based on these findings, we identified a set of core interactions, which are de-
picted in Fig. 3.7. A
core interaction
is defined as an operation that a user performs
by manipulating one or more page areas using a digital pen or his or her hands. Ex-
amples of page areas comprise a printed document page, a printed button element
or an adhesive paper sticker. First and foremost, page areas are contained on printed
sheets of paper. However, by analogy, areas which are displayed on a screen can
equally act as page areas. Note that the same core interaction can have a different
meaning if it is performed on a different type of page area or using a different tool,
e.g. a digital eraser. We distinguish the following core interactions:
