Track Chair:
Human Factors and Usability Issues
Management of Digital Documents
Persistent Conversation: Discourse and Digital Documents
Semiotics of Digital Documents
Speculations: Documents in the Digital Culture
Understanding Digital Documents
It is becoming increasingly clear that the successful use of digital media requires the emergence of new or transformed genres of digital communication. By genres we mean not just particular technologies or modes of communication or presentation (e.g., hypertext, email, the Web, and so on), but complex communicative forms anchored in specific institutions and practices -- the digital analogues, that is, of print forms like the newspaper, the annual report, the how-to manual, the scholarly journal. This includes not just genres replicated from print form, but new and emergent genres that may not have existed in print form.
Topics the minitrack will address include, but are not restricted to,
Minitrack Chairs:
| Mike Shepherd | Geoff Nunberg |
| Faculty of Computer Science | Xerox Palo Alto Research Center |
| Dalhousie University | 3333 Coyote Hill Road |
| P.O. Box 1000 | Palo Alto, CA 94304 |
| Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3J 2X4 | Phone: 415-812-4711 |
| CANADA | Fax: 415-812-4777 |
| Phone: (902)-494-3686 | E-mail: nunberg@parc.xerox.com |
| Fax: (902)-492-1517 | |
| E-mail: shepherd@CS.DAL.CA |
This minitrack is proposed under the Digital Documents Track. The focus of the minitrack is on the role of human factors in the design and development of a wide variety of information systems in which digital documents have an integral role. The minitrack aims to provide an inter-disciplinary forum for researchers and practioners to communicate their work in relation to user-centred design and evaluation issues in the larger context of digital documents. The following topics are relevant to the minitrack:
Authors of papers on other potentally relevant areas should discuss with the minitrack chairs in advance.
Minitrack Chairs:
| Chaomei Chen | Lynn Wilcox |
| Dr. Chaomei Chen | Staff Scientist |
| Department of Information Systems and Computing | FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc. |
| Brunel University | 3400 Hillview Avenue, Bldg. 4 |
| Uxbridge UB8 3PH UNITED KINGDOM | Palo Alto, California 94304 |
| Tel: +44 1895 274000 ext 2569 | Tel: 650-813 7574 |
| Fax: +44 1895 203391 | Fax: 650-813 7081 |
| E-mail: Chaomei.Chen@brunel.ac.uk | E-mail: wilcox@pal.xerox.com |
| http://www.brunel.ac.uk/~cssrccc2/ |
The outcomes of most business processes are documents such as memos, letters, reports, manuals, white papers, articles and so on. Document management systems (DMS) are increasingly becoming important in document-centric industries such as manufacturing, pharmaceutical, finance, and insurance. Researchers have posited that document management systems enable organizations to improve business and publishing processes, to improve communication thereby enabling collaboration and workflow, and to create organizational memory.
Document management technologies have evolved over the past decade from being image management systems, based on scanning and conversion of paper documents, to systems that can manage documents in their native formats without the need for any conversion. DMS enable workflow and collaboration among various stakeholders within an organization in the joint creation of documents.
Document management systems need to provide the following functionality:
Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to, the following:
Minitrack Chairs:
| V. Balasubramanian | P. R. Balasubramanian |
| E-Papyrus, Inc. | Boston University |
| 63E Reading Road | School of Management |
| Edison, NJ 08817 | Management Information Systems |
| Tel/Fax: 732-548-7868 595 | Commonwealth Avenue |
| E-mail: bala@e-papyrus.com | Boston, MA 02215 |
| Tel: 617-353-4402 | |
| Fax: 617-353-5003 | |
| E-mail: bala@bu.edu |
In the fertile ground of the digital medium the concept of "document" has taken on a variety of new and different forms. This mini-track will explore persistent conversation, the transposition of ordinarily ephemeral conversation into the potentially more persistent digital medium. While persistent conversations seem to spring from the impulses that drive oral conversation, their digital embodiment lends them some of the characteristics of documents and opens the door to a variety of new uses and practices. Persistent conversations may be synchronous or asynchronous, expressed via text and/or graphics and/or other media, conducted by a few or a vast number of participants, may range from highly structured to almost amorphous. The phenomena of interest include conversations carried out using email, mailing lists, news groups, bulletin board systems, textual and graphic MUDs, chat and IRC, structured conversation systems, document annotation systems, etc.
We are seeking papers that address issues such as the following:
Minitrack Chair:
Digital computation suffers from a fundamental limitation: once the system of representation is chosen, as it must be for most computing, phenomena that are not represented cannot be studied, or even detected. Digital documents exacerbate the problem, because they are expected to contain all of the meaning of the original documents. Semiotics is the study of the meaning and use of symbol systems, and offers some unique theoretical insight into this problem and possible approaches to removing the representation limit.
This mini-track will discuss approaches to:
The following topics are among those of interest (this list should be taken as indicative, not prescriptive):
Minitrack Chairs:
| Christopher Landauer | Kirstie L. Bellman |
| Aerospace Integration Science Center | same address |
| The Aerospace Corporation | E-mail: bellman@aero.org |
| Mail Stop M1/385 | Phone: (310) 336-2191 |
| P.O.Box 92957 | FAX: (310) 336-1978 (temporary) |
| Los Angeles, California 90009-2957 | |
| E-mail: cal@aero.org | |
| Phone: (310) 336-1361 | |
| FAX: (310) 336-1978 (temporary) |
The minitrack on Speculation on Documents in the Digital Culture invites submissions, which look broadly at issues of the changing roles and natures of documents in the evolving digital culture. Topics include, but are not limited to:
The key criteria for acceptance is that the paper present a new set of insights into the functions and roles of documents in the digital culture, and expand our thinking about these roles and functions, and which provoke discussion.
Minitrack Chair:
| Clifford Lynch |
| University of California |
| Office of the President |
| 300 Lakeside Drive, 8th floor |
| Oakland, CA 94612-3550 |
| 510-987-0522 |
| FAX: 510-839-3573 |
| E-mail: Clifford.lynch@ucop.edu |
How do organizations, work groups and individuals understand the contents of digital documents? This minitrack seeks papers on tools, techniques, software, human-computer interactions, knowledge management, or information retrieval focusing on how users understand the contents of digital documents. Possible areas for papers include summarization, categorization, and key-phrase clustering, user interfaces for understanding documents, and studies of how users access documents and intuit their contents without actually reading much of them. Papers from areas of computer science, information retrieval, psychology and sociology are all encouraged. The goal of this minitrack is a fruitful cross-pollination among researchers in disparate areas and the stimulation of new collaborative project ideas that such discussions may generate.
This minitrack is open to papers on software, human-computer interactions, knowledge managment, information retrieval and studies of how users grasp the contents of digital documents. It encompasses, but is not limited to, summarization, categorization, and key-phrase extraction and clustering, user interfaces for understanding documents, and studies of how users access information about documents and intuit their contents without actually reading much of them. Papers from areas of computer science, information retrieval, psychology and sociology are all encouraged.
Please return to this page for pending updates (last updated 3/25/98)