Chris Kam
Shena Hoffmann
Reference Information
Title: Automatic generation of research trails in web history
Authors: Elin Pedersen, Karl Gyllstrom, Shengyin Gu, Peter Jin Hone
IUI ' 10
Summary
This paper discusses the concept behind research trails. this is a sequence of visited web pages in a particular sequence. A lot of people do research online, however a lot of them have trouble with correct context, according to an ethnography on this topic. This paper uses this for an idea of automatically creating these trails to allow users to figure out when they ended their research. Both semantic and activity evaluations were don't to evaluate a user's history in order to create the trail. Research trails would allow a researcher to see exactly where on the "trail" of research they currently are. In the last part of the paper, the authors discussed how the trails work. The grab topics and search histories in order to group the topics into a trail through Google. Users would be able to see search trails on a new tab
Discussion
I really enjoyed this paper on Research Trails. I could see how this would be extremely useful. I have never been involved in any type of research but I could see how it would be useful to know where a person left off on research. Also, being able to easily navigate back and forth between research documents would also help in efficiency. I have had to search on Google a lot since college so I would be very interesting in trying this product out.
This is an amazing idea! Sometimes I can't even remember why I started a conversation by the time I'm five minutes into it... What were some of the evaluations done to determine the difference between research material and Facebook-study-break-time material? In that regard, it would be useful to have the ability to turn the research tracking on and off, i.e. evaluate the pages I'm looking at now, or don't evaluate them because I'm Facebooking.
ReplyDeleteThis is a pretty sweet idea. Although when I do anything on the computer, i'm all over the place. Like Michael, I wonder how this will take things like that into account. I checked my fantasy league at least 20 times last night...
ReplyDelete