This paper reports on an approach to the analysis of form (layout and formatting) during genre recognition recorded using eye tracking. The researchers focused on eight different types of e-mail, such as calls for papers, newsletters and spam, which were chosen to represent different genres. The study involved the collection of oculographic behavior data based on the scanpath duration and scanpath length based metric, to highlight the ways in which people view the features of genres. We found that genre analysis based on purpose and form (layout features, etc.) was an effective means of identifying the characteristics of these e-mails. The research, carried out on a group of 24 participants, highlighted their interaction and interpretation of the e-mail texts and the visual cues or features perceived. In addition, the ocular strategies of scanning and skimming, they employed for the processing of the texts by block, genre and representation were evaluated.

In this paper we present the concept of Federated Information Sharing Communities (FISC), which leverages organisational and social relationships with document content to provide community-centred information sharing and communication environments. Prominence is given to capabilities that go beyond the generic retrieval of documents to include the ability to retrieve people, their interests and inter-relationships. We focus on providing social awareness "in the large" to help users understand the members within community and the relationships between them. Within the FISC framework, we provide viewpoint retrieval to enable a user to construct member-specific view(s) of the community, based on their various topic interests. As proof of concept, we present the first FISC prototype based on the twenty-five year SIGIR collection and examples of operational results.

In this paper we describe the concept of Federated Information Sharing Communities (FISC), and associated architecture, which provide a way for organisations, distributed workgroups and individuals to build up a federated community based on their common interests over the World Wide Web. To support communities, we develop capabilities that go beyond the generic retrieval of documents to include the ability to retrieve people, their interests and inter-relationships. We focus on providing social awareness "in the large" to help users understand the members within a community and the relationships between them. Within the FISC framework, we provide viewpoint retrieval to enable a user to construct visual contextual views of the community from the perspective of any community member. To evaluate these ideas we develop test beds to compare individual component technologies such as user and group profile construction and similarity matching, and we develop prototypes to explore the broader architecture and usage issues.

Current e-Book browsers provide minimal support for comprehending the organization, narrative structure, and themes, of large complex books. In order to build an understanding of such books, readers should be provided with user interfaces that present, and relate, the organizational, narrative and thematic structures. We propose adapting information retrieval techniques for the purpose of discovering these structures, and sketch three distinctive visualizations for presenting these structures to the e-Book reader. These visualizations are presented within an initial design for an e-Book browser.