This paper describes an approach to IV that involves spatializing text content for enhanced visual browsing and analysis. The application arena is large text document corpora such as digital libraries, regulations andprocedures, archived reports, etc. The basic idea is that text content from these sources may be transformed to a spatial representation that preserves informational characteristics from the documents. The spatial representation may then be visually browsed and analyzed in ways that avoid language processing and that reduce the analysts' mental workload. The result is an interaction with text that more nearly resembles perception and action with the natural world than with the abstractions of written language.

With increasing complexity and interconnectivity of the electric power grid, the scope and complexity of grid operations continues to grow. New paradigms are needed to guide research to improve operations by enhancing situation awareness of operators. Research on human factors/situation awareness is described within a taxonomy of tools and approaches that address different levels of cognitive processing. While user interface features and visualization approaches represent the predominant focus of human factors studies of situation awareness, this paper argues that a complementary level, sensemaking, deserves further consideration by designers of decision support systems for power grid operations. A sensemaking perspective on situation awareness may reveal new insights that complement ongoing human factors research, where the focus of the investigation of errors is to understand why the decision makers experienced the situation the way they did, or why what they saw made sense to them at the time.Index Terms-Computer displays; computer interface human factors; decision making; decision support systems; display human factors; human factors; man-machine systems; power systems; situation awareness; user interfaces.

Collaborations are the essence of science, yet in our information age, most scientific collaborations rely heavily on face-to-face interactions, individual actions, hands-on experimentation, and delayed communications (such as e-mail).For remote collaborations to be as fruitful as sessions with our colleagues down the hall, we need rich communication environments that enable us to focus on knowledge tasks. We also need shared access to primary scientific resources such as instruments, analysis tools, and information sources. Electronic collaborative environments can meet these needs by providing real-time access to collaborators and shared resources.

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