Digital Documents Track

Track Chair

Stephen Smoliar
FX Palo Alto Laboratory
3400 Hillview Avenue, #4
Palo Alto, California 94304
Tel: (415) 813-6703
Fax: (415) 813-7081
Email: smoliar@pal.xerox.com

Digital Documents in Socio-Technical Networks

Papers suitable for this mini-track would include empirical research studies, case studies, and theoretical analyses, such as those focused on ICT-enabled collaboration in socio-technical networks or analyses of informational environments that sustain or thwart collaborators' efforts. Case studies or other types of empirical work that illustrate the use of digital documents as boundary objects in collaborations would be particularly interesting, as would studies that demonstrate how existing informational environments influence adaptation of generic ICTs to network and communication patterns characteristic of a community-of-practice. Specific research topics would include, but not be limited to the following:

• What characterizes collaborations in industry, academia and government, and the related uses of ICTs?
• How have geographically isolated scientists/innovators networked with colleagues (or not)? Does ICT use change existing social networks?
• Can we compare the types of isolation imposed by different types of barriers, such as university/industry barriers, geographic barriers, and other social barriers? And how do these combine to form conducive or restrictive informational environments?
• Have digital documents and/or networking technologies diminished, exacerbated, or had no influence on these barriers to collaboration?
• How are social networks established and maintained through the use of ICTs? What influences their growth and success? Do aspects of ICTs promote participation in these communities-of-practice?

Minitrack Chair

Elizabeth Davidson (davidson@cba.hawaii.edu) 808-956-6657
Roberta Lamb (lamb@cba.hawaii.edu) 808-956-7368
Decision Sciences Department
College of Business Administration
University of Hawaii, Manoa
2404 Maile Way
Honolulu, HI 96822 USA
FAX: 808-956-9889

Digital Documents: Understanding and Communication

This minitrack focuses on how one gains an understanding of a digital document and how that information is communicated. It encompasses retrieval and text analysis methods, including summarization, catergorization and genre theory and detection. In addition, we welcome papers on Web navigation and visualization methods that increase understanding of document content and genre. We solicit papers from workers in computer science, text analysis and linguistics and information retrieval as well as from researchers in psychology, HCI and sociology.

Minitrack Chairs

Knowledge Management, Organizational Memory, and Organizational Learning

Proposed Technical Area:

Organizations and researchers continue to show strong interest in the topic of managing organizational knowledge. Of particular concern to information systems researchers is how to use information systems to convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge to create an organizational memory, and how to effectively organize, store, extract, and manage this knowledge to facilitate organizational learning. This minitrack seeks to integrate researchers working on theoretical and practical solutions in the areas of knowledge management, organizational memory, and organizational learning. Additionally, we seek to create links to digital documents researchers regarding how organizational knowledge and memory can be captured digitally.

Knowledge Management (KM) addresses the process of acquiring, creating, distributing and using knowledge in organizations. Organizational Memory (OM) can be defined as the way an organization stores organizational knowledge and applies it to present activities. Organizational Learning (OL) is the development of shared meanings and interpretations of those meanings to enhance future activities.

Possible Paper Topics:

• Relationships among data, information, and knowledge
• Exploring relationships among knowledge management, organizational memory, and organizational learning
• Integrating organizational knowledge within the organization and across the organization’s value chain
• Developing processes and systems for transferring, storing, integrating, and managing knowledge
• Using digital documents to implement knowledge management and organizational memory systems
• Developing processes and systems for facilitating organizational learning
• Describing case studies of knowledge management and organizational memory systems

Minitrack Chairs

Multimedia Documents in the Office and Education

For example, it has become increasingly apparent that corporate and educational content is distributed via focussed narrowcasting or via special web documents. Meetings and presentations are being captured on digital video for later reference, with indexing and search tools becoming as common as the jog shuttle, fast forward and rewind. Rather than offering training classes, companies are now recording training materials and providing them on demand via a broadband network service. In the classroom, lectures are now commonly recorded for later study or use at another time and place.

In the educational sphere, we are seeing entirely new practices emerge as each class has its own web site -- both for students’ use, and for the instructor's use. This introduction of rich media types, in an intrinsically networked service, with both synchronous and asynchronous aspects, promises to fundamentally reconfigure what it means to be a student AND a teacher.

This minitrack will address issues regarding the use of multimedia documents in the office and classroom. We are seeking high quality papers across a broad spectrum of media creation, use and analysis. Specific topics include but are not restricted to:

• Content analysis
• Video summarization
• Content authoring
• Multimedia document browsing
• User interfaces for new media types
• Content-based retrieval
• Audio analysis
• Applications
• User studies
• Coordinating video with other media types
• Use of multimedia documents over a variety of displays (from PDAs to broadband workstations)

Minitrack Chairs

Persistent Conversation: Perspectives from Research and Design

This minitrack and workshop will bring designers and researchers together to explore persistent conversation, the transposition of ordinarily ephemeral conversation into the potentially persistent digital medium. The phenomena of interest include human-to-human interactions carried out using email, mailing lists, news groups, bulletin board systems, textual and graphic MUDs, chat clients, structured conversation systems, document annotation systems, etc. Computer-mediated conversations blend characteristics of oral conversation with those of written text: they may be synchronous or asynchronous; their audience may be small or vast; they may be highly structured or almost amorphous; etc. The persistence of such conversations gives them the potential to be searched, browsed, replayed, annotated, visualized, restructured, and recontextualized, thus opening the door to a variety of new uses and practices.

The particular aim of the minitrack and workshop is to bring together researchers who analyze existing computer-mediated conversational practices and sites, with designers who propose, implement, or deploy new types of conversational systems. By bringing together participants from such diverse areas as anthropology, computer-mediated communication, HCI, interaction design, linguistics, psychology, rhetoric, sociology, and the like, we hope that the work of each may inform the others, suggesting new questions, methods, perspectives, and design approaches.

We are seeking papers that address one or both of the following two general areas:

• Understanding Practice. The burgeoning popularity of the internet (and intranets) provides an opportunity to study and characterize new forms of conversational practice. Questions of interest range from how various features of conversations (e.g., turn-taking, topic organization, expression of paralinguistic information) have adapted in response to the digital medium, and to new roles played by persistent conversation in domains such as education, business, and entertainment.
• Design. Digital systems do not support conversation well; it is difficult to converse with grace, clarity, depth and coherence over networks. But this need not remain the case. To this end, we welcome analyses of existing systems as well as designs for new systems which better support conversation. Also of interest are inquiries into how participants design their own conversations within the digital medium -- that is, how they make use of system features to create, structure, and regulate their discourse.

Ideally, papers for the minitrack should also address the implications of their analysis or design for one or more of the following areas:

• Analytical Tools. The effort to understand practice can benefit from an array of analytical tools and methods. Such tools may be adapted from existing disciplinary practices, or they may be innovated to analyze the unique properties of persistent conversation. One goal of this minitrack is to gain a fuller understanding of the kinds of insights offered by different analytical approaches to persistent conversation.
• Social Implications. Even as the persistence of digital conversation suggests intriguing new applications, it also raises troubling issues of privacy, authenticity, and authority. At the same time, it has beneficial effects ranging from making a community's discourse more accessible to non-native speakers, to laying the foundations for mutual support and community in distributed groups. Authors are encouraged to reflect on the social implications of their observations, analyses, and designs.
• Historical Parallels. From the constructed dialogs of Plato to the epistolary exchanges of the eighteenth century literati, persistent conversation is not without precedent. How might earlier practices help us understand the new practices evolving in the digital medium? How might they help us design new systems? What perspectives do they offer on the social impacts (present and future) of persistent conversation?

The minitrack will be preceded by a half-day workshop on Monday. The workshop will provide a background for the sessions and set the stage for a dialog between researchers and designers that will continue during the minitrack. The minitrack co-chairs will select in advance a publicly accessible CMC site, which each author will be asked to analyze, critique, redesign, or otherwise examine, using their disciplinary tools and techniques before the workshop convenes; the workshop will include presentations and discussions of the participants' examinations of the site and its content. The workshop is primarily intended for minitrack authors, although other participants are welcome provided they are willing to prepare for it as described above.

Minitrack Chairs

XML: Implications and Applications

XML evolved from standard generalised markup language (SGML) and became a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation in February 1998. One of XML's main goals is to separate the structure and content of a document from its Web presentation. This means that virtually any application type irrespective of the presentation medium being used can read data in XML documents (www.w3.org).

The critical enabler here is that XML is not a language per se but a standard for describing syntax that can be used to create particular vocabularies which can be shared by others (www.W3.org). Basically the structure and content of the data are defined once in a Document Type Definition (DTD) and an XML document, these can then be parsed and displayed in a myriad of ways by applying a particular stylesheet (XSL).

The anticipated benefits of XML include easier integration of legacy systems, improved business-to-business communications, simplified delivery of management information and platform independence across the complete customer-supplier value chain (Information Age, August/September 2000) (Morrison et al, 2000) (Finkelstein & Aiken, 2000).

These benefits are vital in the push for increased Internet services across a variety of business types and customers. If your business is involved with or is considering offering services and information through the Web, then XML should be investigated as a potential new strategy in your IT armoury (www.W3.org).

This minitrack will look at the implications of XML on IT strategy and operations and how XML has been used in real world business applications. The minitrack will aim to provide IT managers with information on the benefits of XML and how it can be used as part of IT strategy development. Practical knowledge will also be provided for systems developers through the presentation of case studies involving XML designs and implementations.

Topics addressed by the minitrack include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Possibilities for and impact of XML on IT strategy development
• Frameworks or architectural models describing the role of XML in application development
• Business models supporting the role of XML in systems design
• Case studies of successful implementations of XML designs
• The role of XML in systems integration
• Support of management decision making using XML
• Portal development using XML
• The use of XML for data transformation
• Use of or introduction of XML standards for consideration of adoption

These topics will provide theoretical and practical examples of how XML can and is being used to improve the service availability across the Internet in the ever expanding business to business environment. The topics look to cover a wide gambit of the XML lifecycle from IT strategy development, through disparate application integration and data transformation, application design, actual implementations, decision support and the development of new standards.

This coverage should provide participants with not only an excellent overview of what XML is and how it can be used for business advantage but also provide a look and feel for real world implementations.

Minitrack Chairs