Research activity systems

Since Vannevar Bush’smemexvision [8], much research has focused on the possibilities and technical challenges of recording and making sense of the user’s interaction with information.

The spirit of activity-aware systems is perhaps best exemplified by theEdit wear/Read wear system [28]. The system was inspired by the observation that the migration of documents from the physical world to the digital world prevents the interaction with an artifact to manifest as wear upon it. This wear can offer clues about the artifact itself. For example, a physical cookbook exhibits forms of wear that reflect the way that book was used; it may more easily flip open to pages of recipes to which the reader frequently referred; and pages with special importance may contain dog-ears, stains, or liner notes. The authors speculate that recording and visualizing information about users’ interaction with documents can enhance their recognition, intuitiveness, and usability. The Edit wear/Read wear system is a text editor which is enhanced by a sidebar which visualizes the amount of time a particular line has been in focus or manipulated (Figure 2.1).

Wexelblat applied the concepts of Edit wear/Read wear to a web browser [55]. In this work, users were able to visualize the paths formed by other users who traveled through the same websites. Though an interesting embodiment of activity-awareness, the work leverages the interactions of the community, rather than the individuals.

In a more macroscopic application ofEdit wear/Read wear, Rekimoto [49] describes

TimeScape a filesystem and interface that can be browsed along the time dimension,

allowing one to see or restore a desktop composition from a previous date (see Fig- ure 2.2). TimeScape augments the spatial desktop with the time dimension. Events such as file creation/modification, web pages surfed to, and emails received are recorded. The emphasis of this system was motivating the use of time as sharable metadata in

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Figure 2.1: Edit wear/Read wear. Next to each line is a bar whose length reflects the amount of time in which the line has been in focus on the window, or the amount of editing which has taken place upon it.

applications from which a third-party system, like their visualizer interface, could op- erate, rather than offering novel methods for identifying document activity. Therefore, it is subject to the problems central to this thesis. Krishnan and Jones developed

the TimeSpace system, a successor to TimeScape, which is oriented toward supporting

user-defined tasks (as opposed to the entire file system) [34].

Fertig et al. present LifeStreams, a system that provides an alternative to the tra- ditional desktop metaphor that replaces spatial organization by a set of temporal doc- ument streams, within which documents are placed automatically based on creation and use dates [17]. The theory is that work is naturally time-ordered, so a system which makes this ordering explicit and apparent makes document management more intuitive. This work has inspired many temporal systems, but itself employs a radical new desktop paradigm, rather than a practical extension to existing systems.

Figure 2.2: Timescape: a visualization of a desktop in which time can be changed. Previous dates show the contents and layout of files as they existed at that date. The timeline shows a visualization of file events.

application states, and screen contents) over time, allowing the user to search for and restore previous states. The system instruments the operating system to record file and network events, and instruments the graphical interface to record screen contents.

The MyLifeBits project aims to support lifetime personal information stores by

retaining and managing as much of the user’s personal information as possible, including all the documents with which they ever interact as well as video recordings and other media [20].