carolyn watters | Dalhousie University (original) (raw)
Papers by carolyn watters
Acadia University is the first laptop university in Canada. The Acadia Advantage program has each... more Acadia University is the first laptop university in Canada. The Acadia Advantage program has each incoming student and each faculty member equipped with a laptop computer. In addition, classrooms, the library, residence rooms, and common areas are wired so that the network is accessible both in and out of classrooms. This initiative has been accompanied by an educational paradigm shift from an instructor-centered to a learner-centered model. In this article we will describe one example of the new class of learning support tools needed to take advantage of the reality of student-centered, mobile technology. We show, by example, how the technology can be used to integrate the student experience inside and outside the classroom and, perhaps more important, within the campus community and within the world community. The Digital Agora is an ambitious interdisciplinary project that supports the understanding and analysis of complex issues in the social sciences within this new environment...
J. Web Eng., 1997
The study area covers 30 square kilometres centred on Warwick. It includes approximately 10 km of... more The study area covers 30 square kilometres centred on Warwick. It includes approximately 10 km of rivers, 6.4 km of canals and approximately 75 hectares of open water such as lakes and ponds (Figure 1). The region is dominated by the Warwick conurbation, which constitutes 20% of the study area. The surrounding matrix is farmland, mostly arable with some pasture along parts of the river corridor and towards the north west of the study plot.
Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Public portals, such as Web search engines, have been available for a number of years and corpora... more Public portals, such as Web search engines, have been available for a number of years and corporate portals that facilitate access to enterprise information within a company, normally through the Web, have been available for the last few years. Such portals are made up of "channels" of information and the purpose of these portals is to provide an interface that presents an organized view of the data to which the user has access, i.e., a straight forward means of access to this data. Both public and corporate portals provide access to potentially vast amounts of complex, distributed information through a Web browser. The infrastructures are based on Web technologies and the common interface is the Web browser. Medical information is vast, complex and distributed. Similar to corporate and public portals, medical portals can provide the medical community with access to medical information through the Web browser. Appropriate portals and channels within those portals can be defined to provide access from the desk of the physician, the hospital administrator, the insurer or the consumer of health services. This paper discusses medical portals that can provide such Web-based access to medical information and describes a three-tier Web architecture to support such access.
Communications of the ACM, 1998
Acadia University is the first laptop university in Canada. The Acadia Advantage program has each... more Acadia University is the first laptop university in Canada. The Acadia Advantage program has each incoming student and each faculty member equipped with a laptop computer. In addition, classrooms, the library, residence rooms, and common areas are wired so that the network is accessible both in and out of classrooms. This initiative has been accompanied by an educational paradigm shift from an instructor-centered to a learner-centered model. In this article we will describe one example of the new class of learning support tools needed to take advantage of the reality of student-centered, mobile technology. We show, by example, how the technology can be used to integrate the student experience inside and outside the classroom and, perhaps more important, within the campus community and within the world community. The Digital Agora is an ambitious interdisciplinary project that supports the understanding and analysis of complex issues in the social sciences within this new environment, using the Web for connectivity both on campus and off campus. A Web-based interdisciplinary project at Acadia University allows students to become active participants in their own learning process.
Information Processing and Management, Sep 1, 1997
Proceedings of the Thirty-First Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
The combination of the computer and the Internet has resulted in the emergence of cybergenre, a n... more The combination of the computer and the Internet has resulted in the emergence of cybergenre, a new class of genre. Cybergenre can be characterized by the triple, <content, form, functionality>, where functionality refers to the capabilities afforded by this new medium. When an existing genre initially migrates to this new medium, it is usually as a faithful reproduction of the existing genre in both content and form with little new functionality. It may then evolve into a variant cybergenre as it incorporates functionality afforded by the computer and Internet. Cybergenres also include novel genres, either not based on previously existing genres or substantially different from existing genres on the basis of increased functionality. These novel genres may have either persistent or virtual instantiations. This paper proposes a taxonomy of these cybergenres and examines the evolution of the news cybergenre and the mathematics dictionary cybergenre within the context of this taxonomy.
36th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2003. Proceedings of the
Text categorization is the process of sorting text documents into one or more predefined categori... more Text categorization is the process of sorting text documents into one or more predefined categories or classes of similar documents. Differences in the results of such categorization arise from the feature set chosen to base the association of a given document with a given category. Advocates of text categorization recognize that the sorting of text documents into categories of like documents reduces the overhead required for fast retrieval of such documents and provides smaller domains in which the users may explore similar documents. In this paper we are interested in examining whether automatic classification of news texts can be improved by a prefiltering the vocabulary to reduce the feature set used in the computations. First we compare artificial neural network and support vector machine algorithms for use as text classifiers of news items. Secondly, we identify a reduction in feature set that provides improved results.
Proceedings of the Annual Conference of CAIS / Actes du congrès annuel de l'ACSI
DalText is a prototype information retrieval system that permits the user to select access method... more DalText is a prototype information retrieval system that permits the user to select access methods based on the task at hand. The system integrates multiple access techniques to textual data that are not maintained in traditional database management systems or information retrieval systems. The access methods available include viewing the data as a sequence of records for browsing.
Hypermedia
An alternative tomanual composition of hypertext databases is conversion from existing texts. Suc... more An alternative tomanual composition of hypertext databases is conversion from existing texts. Such conversion often requires careful analysis of the text document in order to determine howbest to represent its structure. We illustrate some of the issues of conversion with an analysis of the Oxford English Dictionary.
2009 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2009
Abstract When reading online, users sometimes need auxiliary information to complement or fill in... more Abstract When reading online, users sometimes need auxiliary information to complement or fill in their own background knowledge in order to better understand a document that they are reading. We believe that delivering this information in the least intrusive fashion possible ...
2010 10th International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications, 2010
the fundamental model for Web navigation has not changed much since the beginning of the developm... more the fundamental model for Web navigation has not changed much since the beginning of the development of Hypertext and Web search engines. Current browsing allows users to search by formulating queries, entering known URLs, and by navigation by following links embedded in webpages. Considerable research has focused on navigation mechanisms to improve the effectiveness of the process of finding relevant information. This paper examines a method for navigating using a technique based on presenting a view of a website as a tree of augmented links that the user can utilize in information gathering tasks. A user study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of this technique. The results of the study indicate that the visualized tree-based presentation technique is effective and has potential to complement traditional query formulation to provide a more effective browsing experience for users.
Proceedings of the 2005 Acm Symposium on Applied Computing, 2005
Users expect access to Web data from a wide range of devices, both wired and wireless. Many users... more Users expect access to Web data from a wide range of devices, both wired and wireless. Many users switch back and forth between devices, including laptops and Personal Data Assistants (PDAs), and expect to be able to continue working with that data. The goal of this research is to inform the design of applications that support the user by providing reasonably seamless migration of Web data among internet-compatible devices with minimal loss of effectiveness and efficiency. Earlier studies concentrated on the dynamic transformation of text content, lists, and forms embedded in web pages for access on a range of devices from desktop to handheld. This study focuses on the transformation of large tables onto small mobile devices. In this paper we report on the results of two user studies that examine effectiveness and efficiency of three basic models for the display of tables, originally intended for use on larger screen, on PDA size screens for both simple and complex tasks.
Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2007
ABSTRACT The Measuring Web Effectiveness: The User Perspective minitrack is a multidisciplinary f... more ABSTRACT The Measuring Web Effectiveness: The User Perspective minitrack is a multidisciplinary forum for considering issues related to the effectiveness of Web searching from the user¿s perspective. The minitrack examines the behavior of users seeking information on the Web. This is allows us to bring into the discussion, considerations of the impact that design choices in the development of new Web systems and tools have on Web users engaging a wide range of expertise, including human computer interface design, information seeking behavior, and information management.
International Journal of Human Computer Studies, 2003
... The zoom techniques are more sophisticated methods that allow the visualizing of areas of lar... more ... The zoom techniques are more sophisticated methods that allow the visualizing of areas of large data sets by the use of focus areas. These focus areas may bestandalone or may be presented within a metaphorical context. ...
Proceedings of the 2010 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2010
... Jane E. Mason Michael Shepherd Jack Duffy Vlado Keelj Carolyn Watters ... The 20-Genre data ... more ... Jane E. Mason Michael Shepherd Jack Duffy Vlado Keelj Carolyn Watters ... The 20-Genre data set is a multi-labeled Web page collection constructed by Mitja Lutrek and Andrej Bratko, and described in Vidulin et al. [24, 25]. ...
New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia Hypermedia, 1996
The convergence of digital presentation technologies, including video, audio, images, full colour... more The convergence of digital presentation technologies, including video, audio, images, full colour, and animation, has given rise to the development of multimedia and hypermedia presentation systems. Multimedia systems are based on the synchronization and co-ordination of data through media specific software and hardware so that data of a variety of media types enhance the overall impact of the presentation. Hypermedia
Information Processing and Management an International Journal, Jul 1, 1994
We are seeing a shift of the focus of information access from a data-centered to a user-centered ... more We are seeing a shift of the focus of information access from a data-centered to a user-centered paradigm. By a user-centered paradigm, we refer to information access that is driven not by the structure of the databases in the system, but rather by views of the databases needed to satisfy an information need as perceived by the user. This paradigm relies on dynamic views that may be independent of the structure of the accessed databases. The user determines both what data is included in these dynamic views and what, if any, structures are imposed on the data in these views. The Daltext system is a prototype system that falls within the user-centered paradigm. It allows the user to define views dynamically. Daltext allows the user to determine what data is included in these dynamic views by specifying desired attributes and values. It allows the user to determine what, if any, structures are imposed on the data in these views by allowing the user to frame the view within a particular model. At the user's discretion, the view may be framed within a datastream model, a set model, a relational model, and/or a hierarchical model.
Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2006, Jun 7, 2006
In this paper, we explore how factors such as task and individual differences influence the usage... more In this paper, we explore how factors such as task and individual differences influence the usage of different web browser navigation mechanisms (e.g., clicked links, bookmarks, autocomplete). We conducted a field study of 21 participants and logged detailed web browser usage. Participants were asked to categorize their web usage according to the following schema: Fact Finding, Information Gathering, Browsing, and Transactions. Using this data, we have identified three factors that play a role in the use of navigation mechanisms: task session, task type, and individual differences. These findings have implications for the future design of new and improved web navigation mechanisms.
Acadia University is the first laptop university in Canada. The Acadia Advantage program has each... more Acadia University is the first laptop university in Canada. The Acadia Advantage program has each incoming student and each faculty member equipped with a laptop computer. In addition, classrooms, the library, residence rooms, and common areas are wired so that the network is accessible both in and out of classrooms. This initiative has been accompanied by an educational paradigm shift from an instructor-centered to a learner-centered model. In this article we will describe one example of the new class of learning support tools needed to take advantage of the reality of student-centered, mobile technology. We show, by example, how the technology can be used to integrate the student experience inside and outside the classroom and, perhaps more important, within the campus community and within the world community. The Digital Agora is an ambitious interdisciplinary project that supports the understanding and analysis of complex issues in the social sciences within this new environment...
J. Web Eng., 1997
The study area covers 30 square kilometres centred on Warwick. It includes approximately 10 km of... more The study area covers 30 square kilometres centred on Warwick. It includes approximately 10 km of rivers, 6.4 km of canals and approximately 75 hectares of open water such as lakes and ponds (Figure 1). The region is dominated by the Warwick conurbation, which constitutes 20% of the study area. The surrounding matrix is farmland, mostly arable with some pasture along parts of the river corridor and towards the north west of the study plot.
Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Public portals, such as Web search engines, have been available for a number of years and corpora... more Public portals, such as Web search engines, have been available for a number of years and corporate portals that facilitate access to enterprise information within a company, normally through the Web, have been available for the last few years. Such portals are made up of "channels" of information and the purpose of these portals is to provide an interface that presents an organized view of the data to which the user has access, i.e., a straight forward means of access to this data. Both public and corporate portals provide access to potentially vast amounts of complex, distributed information through a Web browser. The infrastructures are based on Web technologies and the common interface is the Web browser. Medical information is vast, complex and distributed. Similar to corporate and public portals, medical portals can provide the medical community with access to medical information through the Web browser. Appropriate portals and channels within those portals can be defined to provide access from the desk of the physician, the hospital administrator, the insurer or the consumer of health services. This paper discusses medical portals that can provide such Web-based access to medical information and describes a three-tier Web architecture to support such access.
Communications of the ACM, 1998
Acadia University is the first laptop university in Canada. The Acadia Advantage program has each... more Acadia University is the first laptop university in Canada. The Acadia Advantage program has each incoming student and each faculty member equipped with a laptop computer. In addition, classrooms, the library, residence rooms, and common areas are wired so that the network is accessible both in and out of classrooms. This initiative has been accompanied by an educational paradigm shift from an instructor-centered to a learner-centered model. In this article we will describe one example of the new class of learning support tools needed to take advantage of the reality of student-centered, mobile technology. We show, by example, how the technology can be used to integrate the student experience inside and outside the classroom and, perhaps more important, within the campus community and within the world community. The Digital Agora is an ambitious interdisciplinary project that supports the understanding and analysis of complex issues in the social sciences within this new environment, using the Web for connectivity both on campus and off campus. A Web-based interdisciplinary project at Acadia University allows students to become active participants in their own learning process.
Information Processing and Management, Sep 1, 1997
Proceedings of the Thirty-First Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
The combination of the computer and the Internet has resulted in the emergence of cybergenre, a n... more The combination of the computer and the Internet has resulted in the emergence of cybergenre, a new class of genre. Cybergenre can be characterized by the triple, <content, form, functionality>, where functionality refers to the capabilities afforded by this new medium. When an existing genre initially migrates to this new medium, it is usually as a faithful reproduction of the existing genre in both content and form with little new functionality. It may then evolve into a variant cybergenre as it incorporates functionality afforded by the computer and Internet. Cybergenres also include novel genres, either not based on previously existing genres or substantially different from existing genres on the basis of increased functionality. These novel genres may have either persistent or virtual instantiations. This paper proposes a taxonomy of these cybergenres and examines the evolution of the news cybergenre and the mathematics dictionary cybergenre within the context of this taxonomy.
36th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2003. Proceedings of the
Text categorization is the process of sorting text documents into one or more predefined categori... more Text categorization is the process of sorting text documents into one or more predefined categories or classes of similar documents. Differences in the results of such categorization arise from the feature set chosen to base the association of a given document with a given category. Advocates of text categorization recognize that the sorting of text documents into categories of like documents reduces the overhead required for fast retrieval of such documents and provides smaller domains in which the users may explore similar documents. In this paper we are interested in examining whether automatic classification of news texts can be improved by a prefiltering the vocabulary to reduce the feature set used in the computations. First we compare artificial neural network and support vector machine algorithms for use as text classifiers of news items. Secondly, we identify a reduction in feature set that provides improved results.
Proceedings of the Annual Conference of CAIS / Actes du congrès annuel de l'ACSI
DalText is a prototype information retrieval system that permits the user to select access method... more DalText is a prototype information retrieval system that permits the user to select access methods based on the task at hand. The system integrates multiple access techniques to textual data that are not maintained in traditional database management systems or information retrieval systems. The access methods available include viewing the data as a sequence of records for browsing.
Hypermedia
An alternative tomanual composition of hypertext databases is conversion from existing texts. Suc... more An alternative tomanual composition of hypertext databases is conversion from existing texts. Such conversion often requires careful analysis of the text document in order to determine howbest to represent its structure. We illustrate some of the issues of conversion with an analysis of the Oxford English Dictionary.
2009 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2009
Abstract When reading online, users sometimes need auxiliary information to complement or fill in... more Abstract When reading online, users sometimes need auxiliary information to complement or fill in their own background knowledge in order to better understand a document that they are reading. We believe that delivering this information in the least intrusive fashion possible ...
2010 10th International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications, 2010
the fundamental model for Web navigation has not changed much since the beginning of the developm... more the fundamental model for Web navigation has not changed much since the beginning of the development of Hypertext and Web search engines. Current browsing allows users to search by formulating queries, entering known URLs, and by navigation by following links embedded in webpages. Considerable research has focused on navigation mechanisms to improve the effectiveness of the process of finding relevant information. This paper examines a method for navigating using a technique based on presenting a view of a website as a tree of augmented links that the user can utilize in information gathering tasks. A user study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of this technique. The results of the study indicate that the visualized tree-based presentation technique is effective and has potential to complement traditional query formulation to provide a more effective browsing experience for users.
Proceedings of the 2005 Acm Symposium on Applied Computing, 2005
Users expect access to Web data from a wide range of devices, both wired and wireless. Many users... more Users expect access to Web data from a wide range of devices, both wired and wireless. Many users switch back and forth between devices, including laptops and Personal Data Assistants (PDAs), and expect to be able to continue working with that data. The goal of this research is to inform the design of applications that support the user by providing reasonably seamless migration of Web data among internet-compatible devices with minimal loss of effectiveness and efficiency. Earlier studies concentrated on the dynamic transformation of text content, lists, and forms embedded in web pages for access on a range of devices from desktop to handheld. This study focuses on the transformation of large tables onto small mobile devices. In this paper we report on the results of two user studies that examine effectiveness and efficiency of three basic models for the display of tables, originally intended for use on larger screen, on PDA size screens for both simple and complex tasks.
Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2007
ABSTRACT The Measuring Web Effectiveness: The User Perspective minitrack is a multidisciplinary f... more ABSTRACT The Measuring Web Effectiveness: The User Perspective minitrack is a multidisciplinary forum for considering issues related to the effectiveness of Web searching from the user¿s perspective. The minitrack examines the behavior of users seeking information on the Web. This is allows us to bring into the discussion, considerations of the impact that design choices in the development of new Web systems and tools have on Web users engaging a wide range of expertise, including human computer interface design, information seeking behavior, and information management.
International Journal of Human Computer Studies, 2003
... The zoom techniques are more sophisticated methods that allow the visualizing of areas of lar... more ... The zoom techniques are more sophisticated methods that allow the visualizing of areas of large data sets by the use of focus areas. These focus areas may bestandalone or may be presented within a metaphorical context. ...
Proceedings of the 2010 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2010
... Jane E. Mason Michael Shepherd Jack Duffy Vlado Keelj Carolyn Watters ... The 20-Genre data ... more ... Jane E. Mason Michael Shepherd Jack Duffy Vlado Keelj Carolyn Watters ... The 20-Genre data set is a multi-labeled Web page collection constructed by Mitja Lutrek and Andrej Bratko, and described in Vidulin et al. [24, 25]. ...
New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia Hypermedia, 1996
The convergence of digital presentation technologies, including video, audio, images, full colour... more The convergence of digital presentation technologies, including video, audio, images, full colour, and animation, has given rise to the development of multimedia and hypermedia presentation systems. Multimedia systems are based on the synchronization and co-ordination of data through media specific software and hardware so that data of a variety of media types enhance the overall impact of the presentation. Hypermedia
Information Processing and Management an International Journal, Jul 1, 1994
We are seeing a shift of the focus of information access from a data-centered to a user-centered ... more We are seeing a shift of the focus of information access from a data-centered to a user-centered paradigm. By a user-centered paradigm, we refer to information access that is driven not by the structure of the databases in the system, but rather by views of the databases needed to satisfy an information need as perceived by the user. This paradigm relies on dynamic views that may be independent of the structure of the accessed databases. The user determines both what data is included in these dynamic views and what, if any, structures are imposed on the data in these views. The Daltext system is a prototype system that falls within the user-centered paradigm. It allows the user to define views dynamically. Daltext allows the user to determine what data is included in these dynamic views by specifying desired attributes and values. It allows the user to determine what, if any, structures are imposed on the data in these views by allowing the user to frame the view within a particular model. At the user's discretion, the view may be framed within a datastream model, a set model, a relational model, and/or a hierarchical model.
Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2006, Jun 7, 2006
In this paper, we explore how factors such as task and individual differences influence the usage... more In this paper, we explore how factors such as task and individual differences influence the usage of different web browser navigation mechanisms (e.g., clicked links, bookmarks, autocomplete). We conducted a field study of 21 participants and logged detailed web browser usage. Participants were asked to categorize their web usage according to the following schema: Fact Finding, Information Gathering, Browsing, and Transactions. Using this data, we have identified three factors that play a role in the use of navigation mechanisms: task session, task type, and individual differences. These findings have implications for the future design of new and improved web navigation mechanisms.