A Multiscale Workspace for Managing Personal Information Collections

Poster

Student: Dan Bauer, UCSD

Advisor: Jim Hollan, UCSD

Abstract: People maintain personal libraries of digital information (including documents, bookmarks, and photos) and interact with them in two closely-related ways: managing -- organizing, indexing, culling, and assimilating new items -- and exploring -- browsing, filtering, and reflecting on the contents. Both behaviors may benefit from visual access to items and the use of spatial arrangements. This research hopes to better understand the interdependence of these interactive strategies and to build software environments which support them. In particular we are developing Dynapad, a multiscale visual workspace with a versatile and extensible suite of spatial-organization tools which faciliate the management and exploration of information collections.

Bio: Dan Bauer is a Ph.D. student and a member of the Distributed Cognition and HCI Lab in the Cognitive Science Department at the University of California, San Diego. His primary research investigates the utility of visual workspaces for exploring and managing collections of information. More broadly, his research interests include many facets of information visualization, ambient information sources, multimodal interaction, and the interdependence of cognitive artifacts and "sensemaking". In the past, he has worked in natural-language processing with finite-state technology at the Rank Xerox Research Center in Grenoble, France, and in the help-desk software industry in Silicon Valley. He is also a 1993 graduate of the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford University.