Browsing by Author "Andrews, Christopher"

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    Co-located Collaboration on a Large, High-Resolution Display
    Vogt, Katherine; North, Christopher L.; Andrews, Christopher; Endert, Alex (2010)
    Few have studied co-located collaboration, let alone co-located collaboration and the sensemaking process. Here, we define co-located collaboration as multiple users working on the same display. Intelligence analysts often must filter through massive amounts of data which may contain large portions of text. As the benefits of collaboration [1] and large displays [2] have aheady separately proven themselves, we chose to examine the sensemaking process when these two aspects are combined. The environment we created also included multiple penwwl input devices to create a multiuser workspace. By observing the user roles adopted, collaborative processes, organization of the space, and perceived ownership or sharing of territory on the display. We hope to contribute valuable insight into the design implications of software.
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    Large High Resolution Displays for Co-Located Collaborative Intelligence Analysis
    Bradel, Lauren; Andrews, Christopher; Endert, Alex; Koch, Kristen; Vogt, Katherine; Hutchings, Duke; North, Christopher L. (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 2011-11-01)
    Large, high-resolution vertical displays carry the potential to increase the accuracy of collaborative sensemaking, given correctly designed visual analytics tools. From an exploratory user study using a fictional intelligence analysis task, we investigated how users interact with the display to construct spatial schemas and externalize information, as well as how they establish shared and private territories. We investigated the spatial strategies of users partitioned by tool type used (document- or entity-centric). We classified the types of territorial behavior exhibited in terms of how the users interacted with the display (integrated or independent workspaces). Next, we examined how territorial behavior impacted the common ground between the pairs of users. Finally, we recommend design guidelines for building co-located collaborative visual analytics tools specifically for use on large, high-resolution vertical displays.
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    Space for Two to Think: Large, High-Resolution Displays for Co-located Collaborative Sensemaking
    Bradel, Lauren; Andrews, Christopher; Endert, Alex; Vogt, Katherine; Hutchings, Duke; North, Christopher L. (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 2011-06-01)
    Large, high-resolution displays carry the potential to enhance single display groupware collaborative sensemaking for intelligence analysis tasks by providing space for common ground to develop, but it is up to the visual analytics tools to utilize this space effectively. In an exploratory study, we compared two tools (Jigsaw and a document viewer), which were adapted to support multiple input devices, to observe how the large display space was used in establishing and maintaining common ground during an intelligence analysis scenario using 50 textual documents. We discuss the spatial strategies employed by the pairs of participants, which were largely dependent on tool type (data-centric or function-centric), as well as how different visual analytics tools used collaboratively on large, high-resolution displays impact common ground in both process and solution. Using these findings, we suggest design considerations to enable future co-located collaborative sensemaking tools to take advantage of the benefits of collaborating on large, high-resolution displays.
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    Space to Think: Sensemaking and Large, High-Resolution Displays
    Andrews, Christopher (Virginia Tech, 2011-08-09)
    Display technology has developed significantly over the last decade, and it is becoming increasingly feasible to construct large, high-resolution displays. Prior work has shown a number of key performance advantages for these displays that can largely be attributed to the replacement of virtual navigation (e.g., panning and zooming) with physical navigation (e.g., moving, turning, glancing). This research moves beyond the question of performance or efficiency and examines ways in which the large, high-resolution display can support the cognitive demanding task of sensemaking. The core contribution of this work is to show that the physical properties of large, high- resolution displays create a fundamentally different environment from conventional displays, one that is inherently spatial, resulting in support for a greater range of embodied resources. To support this, we describe a series of studies that examined the process of sensemaking on one of these displays. These studies illustrate how the display becomes a cognitive partner of the the analyst, encouraging the use of the space for the externalization of the analyst's thought process or findings. We particularly highlight how the flexibility of the space sup- ports the use of incremental formalism, a process of gradually structuring information as understanding grows. Building on these observations, we have developed a new sensemaking environment called Analyst's Workspace (AW), which makes use of a large, high-resolution display as a core component of its design. The primary goal of AW is to provide an environment that unifies the activities of foraging and synthesis into a single investigative thread. AW addresses this goal through the use of an integrated spatial environment in which full text documents serve as primary sources of information, investigative tools for pursuing leads, and sensemaking artifacts that can be arranged in the space to encode information about relationships between events and entities. This work also provides a collection of design principles that fell out of the development of AW, and that we hope can guide future development of analytic tools on large, high-resolution displays.