Social data mining systemsenable people to share opinions and benefit from each other's experience. They do this by mining and redistributing information from computational records of social activity such as Usenet messages, system usage history, citations, or hyperlinks. Some general questions for evaluating such systems are: (1) is the extracted information valuable? and (2) do interfaces based on the information improve user task performance? We report here onTopicShop, a system that mines information from the structure and content of Web pages and provides an exploratory information workspace interface. We carried out experiments that yielded positive answers to both evaluation questions. First, a number of automatically computable features about Web sites do a good job of predicting expert quality judgments about sites. Second, compared to popular Web search interfaces, the TopicShop interface to this information lets users select significantly more high-quality sites, in less time and with less effort, and to organize the sites they select into personally meaningful collections more quickly and easily. We conclude by discussing how our results may be applied and considering how they touch on general issues concerning quality, expertise, and consensus.

Many applications require users to specify preferences. We support users in this task by letting them define preferences relative to their personal history or that of other users. We implement this idea using a graphical technique called control shadows, which we have implemented on both a desktop computer and on a cell phone with a small, grayscale display. An empirical study compared user performance on the graphical interface and a text table interface with identical functionality. On the desktop, users completed their tasks more quickly and effectively and strongly preferred the graphical interface. On the cell phone, there was no significant difference between the graphical and table interfaces. Finally, personal history proved useful in specifying preferences, but history of other users was not helpful

For many topics, the World Wide Web contains hundreds or thousands of relevant documents of widely varying quality. Users face a daunting challenge in identifying a small subset of documents worthy of their attention.

Article TopicShop: enhanced support for evaluating and organizing collections of Web sites Share on Authors: Brian Amento AT&T Labs - Research, 180 Park Avenue, P.O. Box 971, Florham Park, NJ and Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA AT&T Labs - Research, 180 Park Avenue, P.O. Box 971, Florham Park, NJ and Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VAView Profile , Loren Terveen AT&T Labs - Research, 180 Park Avenue, P.O. Box 971, Florham Park, NJ AT&T Labs - Research, 180 Park Avenue, P.O. Box 971, Florham Park, NJView Profile , Will Hill AT&T Labs - Research, 180 Park Avenue, P.O. Box 971, Florham Park, NJ AT&T Labs - Research, 180 Park Avenue, P.O. Box 971, Florham Park, NJView Profile , Deborah Hix Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VAView Profile Authors Info & Claims UIST '00: Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technologyNovember 2000 Pages 201–209https://doi.org/10.1145/354401.354771Online:01 November 2000Publication History 19citation728DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations19Total Downloads728Last 12 Months21Last 6 weeks3 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Topic management is the task of gathering, evaluating, organizing, and sharing a set of web sites for a specific topic. Current web tools do not provide adequate support for this task. We created the TopicShop system to address this need. TopicShop includes (1) a webcrawler that discovers relevant web sites and builds site profiles, and (2) user interfaces for exploring and organizing sites. We conducted an empirical study comparing user performance with TopicShop vs. YahooTM. TopicShop subjects found over 80% more high-quality sites (where quality was determined by independent expert judgements) while browsing only 8 1% as many sites and completing their task in 89% of the time. The site profile data that TopicShop provides - in particular, the number of pages on a site and the number of other sites that link to it - was the key to these results, as users exploited it to identify the most promising sites quickly and easily.

For many purposes, the Web page is too small a unit of interaction and analysis. Web sites are structured multimedia documents consisting of many pages, and users often are interested in obtaining and evaluating entire collections of topically related sites. Once such a collection is obtained, users face the challenge of exploring, comprehending and organizing the items. We report four innovations that address these user needs: (1) we replaced the Web page with the Websiteas the basic unit of interaction and analysis;(2) we defined a new informationstructure, theclan graph, that groups together sets of related sites; (3) we augment the representation of a site with asite profile, information about site structure and content that helps inform user evaluation of a site; and (4) we invented a new graph visualization, theauditorium visualization, that reveals important structural and content properties of sites within a clan graph. Detailed analysis and user studies document the utility of this approach. The clan graph construction algorithm tends to filter out irrelevant sites and discover additional relevant items. The auditorium visualization, augmented with drill-down capabilities to explore site profile data, helps users to find high-quality sites as well as sites that serve a particular function.

For many purposes, the Web page is too small a unit of interaction.Users often want to interact with larger-scale entities, particularly collections of topically related items.We report three innovations that address this user need.l We replaced the web page with the web sire as the basic unit of interaction and analysis-* We defined a new information structure, the clan graph, that groups together sets of related sites.lWe invented a new graph visualization, the auditorium visualization, that reveals important structural and content properties of sites within a clan graph.We have discovered interesting information that can be extracted from the structure of a clan graph.We can identify structurally important sites with many incoming or outgoing links.Lii between sites serve important functions: they often identify "f?ont door" pages of sites, sometimes identify especially significant pages within a site, and occasionally contain informative anchor text.

Links between web sites can be seen as evidence of a type of emergent collaboration among web site authors. We report here on an empirical investigation into emergent collaboration. We developed a webcrawling algorithm and tested its performance on topics volunteered by 30 subjects. Our findings include: . Some topics exhibit emergent collaboration, some do not. The presence of commercial sites reduces collaboration. . When sites are linked with other sites, they tend to group into one large, tightly connected component. . Connectivity can serve as the basis for collaborative filtering. Human experts rate connected sites as significantly more relevant and of higher quality. Keywords Social filtering, collaborative filtering, computer supported cooperative work, human computer interaction, information access, information retrieval INTRODUCTION The field of CSCW sees collaboration as involving people who know they are working together, e.g., to edit a document, to carry out a soft...

Usenet may be regarded as the worl$s largest conversatioti appficatioq with over 17,000 newsgronps and 3 fion users.Despite its ubiquity and poptiari~, however, we know Etie about the natore of the interactions it suppo~.~s empirical paper investigates mass interaction in UseneL We anrdyse over 2.15 Mon messages from 659,450 posters, co~ected from 500 newsgoups over 6 months.We fit characterise mass interactio~presenting basic data about demographics, conversational strategies and interactivity-Using predictions tiom the common ground [3] model of interactio~we next conduct causal modetig to determine relations bemeen demographics, conversational strategim and interactiv~.We find evidence for moderate conversatiomd threading, but hge participation ine@ties in Usene4 with a d minority of participants posting a large proportion of messages.Contrary to the common gromd model and 'Etiquette" guidefies [8,10] we ho find that "cross-posting" to extemd newsgroups is hig~y fiequenk Our predictions about the eEects of demographics on conversatioti strategy were largely cotie~but we found disconfirming evidence about the relations befi'een conversational strategy and interactivity.Contrary to our expectations, boti cross-posting and short messages promote interactivity.We conclude that in order to e~lain mass interaction, the common ground model must be mowed to ticorporate notions of weak ties [5,q and communication overload [11,18].Ke~ords hlass interactio~Usene< conversatio~newsgroups, common groun~moderatio~FAQS, netiquette, empirid. lNTRODUC~ONUsenet maybe regarded as the worl&s largest and fmtest growing conversationrd appficatiom k 1988 there were fewer than 500 news~oups.bent estimatesvary, but at the time of our dab co~ection in Dec. 1996, there were Ptission 10de distal or hard copies ofall or pti ofthis ~vorkfor personal or classroom use is granted without f= protided that copies Zrenotmade or dis~%uted for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the fill citation on the fimt paga To copy othm~ise to republish, to post on sen'em or to redistribute to Iis& Tquires prior sptific permission and~ora fee CSCW 98 Seatie Wastinson USA ---_ -.

As people participate in the thousands of global conversations that comprise Usenet news, one thing they do is post their opinions of web resources. Phoaks is a collaborative filtering system that continuously parses, classifies, abstracts and tallies those opinions. About 3,500 users per day consult Phoaks web pages that reflect the results. Phoaks also features a general architecture for building similar collaborative filtering interfaces to conversational data. We report here on the Phoaks resource recommendation interface, the architecture, and the issues and experience that make up its rationale. Keywords human-computer interaction, human interface, computersupported cooperative work, organizational computing, social filtering, collaborative filtering, data mining,

We report on an investigation of using Usenet newsgroups for social filtering of Web resources. Our main empirical results are: (1) for the period of May ’96 to Jul ’96, about 23% of Usenet news messages mention Web resources, (2) 19% of resource mentions are recommendations (as opposed, e.g., to home pages), (3) we can’automatically recognize recommendations with at least 90% accuracy, and (4) in some newsgroups, certain resources are mentioned significantly more frequently than others and thus appear to play a central role for that community. We have created a Web site that summarizes the most frequently and recently mentioned Web resources for 1400 newsgroups.

Article Recommending and evaluating choices in a virtual community of use Share on Authors: Will Hill Bellcore, 445 South Street, Morristown, NJ Bellcore, 445 South Street, Morristown, NJView Profile , Larry Stead Bellcore, 445 South Street, Morristown, NJ Bellcore, 445 South Street, Morristown, NJView Profile , Mark Rosenstein Bellcore, 445 South Street, Morristown, NJ Bellcore, 445 South Street, Morristown, NJView Profile , George Furnas Bellcore, 445 South Street, Morristown, NJ Bellcore, 445 South Street, Morristown, NJView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '95: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsMay 1995 Pages 194–201https://doi.org/10.1145/223904.223929Online:01 May 1995Publication History 590citation5,263DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations590Total Downloads5,263Last 12 Months235Last 6 weeks30 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

To guide the design of advice-offering user-assistance software, "Wizard of Oz" techniques were used to observe the interaction between users of a graphical statistical package and a human playing the role of a simulated intelligent advisory system. The results emphasize the complexities of advisory processes. Video data for 34 cases of advice seeking, giving, and following were analyzed in detail. The evidence indicates that clients followed prescriptive advice effectively and efficiently in slightly more than half the cases. For other cases, clients performed twice as many actions as needed in three times as much time and never reached prescribed states. A hypothesis that observed advice-following difficulties were correlated with advice abstractness was not supported. Rather, it seems advice did not match well with client's knowledge of the system. Impacts on advisory system design are discussed.

No abstract available.

We describe two applications that illustrate the idea of computational wear in the domain of document processing. By graphically depicting the history of author and reader interactions with documents, these applications offer otherwise unavailable information to guide work. We discuss how their design accords with a theory of professional work and an informational physics perspective on interface design.

Complextasks consist of many threads of activity to remember and coordinate.Managing these threads is a significant part of problem solving.Our research attempts to find ways to assist this process.In this paper we present DETENTE, an object-oriented system to embed agendas in complex application interfaces.

The authors maintain that of particular importance for visualization excellence is an understanding of effective deictic facilities, especially new techniques made possible by computation. They explain what deixis is and why it is fundamental to visualization and they analyze some of the requirements for effective deixis in the context of emergent visualization technology.>

Video data for thirty-four cases of advice seeking, giving and following behavior at a graphical computer interface were analyzed in detail. The evidence indicated that clients followed prescriptive advice effectively and efficiently in slightly more than half the cases. For other cases, clients performed twice as many actions as needed in three times as much time and never reached prescribed states. A hypothesis that observed advice following difficulties were correlated with advice abstractness was not supported. Rather, it seems advice did not match well with clients' knowledge of the system in particular isolated details.

“Wizard of Oz” techniques were used to observe the interaction between users of a statistical package and a human playing the role of an simulated intelligent advisory system. The results emphasized the complexities of the advisory process. More than half of the clients' requests sought help on planning actions toward achieving task goals. Further, protocols collected from the advisor while advice was given revealed the importance of constructing models of the user's current and past interaction with the application, and of addressing the high-level goals that underlie clients' explicit questions. The relevance of these findings to the development of intelligent advisory systems is discussed.

Detailed user activity scripts from two previous studies of novice users working at a command language or a direct representation interface were submitted to independent expert judges for the justified ascription of misconceptions. Our initial hypothesis was that behavioral evidence for such misconceptions comes about as a result of well-articulated hypothetical reasoning. Although the evidence we obtained supports this view, it also suggests that for the direct representation case some activity normally attributed to misconceptions is non-reasoned in nature and governed by inherent powers of the representation.