Issues in the design of computer support for co-authoring and commenting

Abstract

This paper reports on a project to develop a "work in preparation" editor, or PREP editor, to study co-authoring and commenting relationships. As part of the project, we have identified three issues in designing computer support for co-authoring and commenting:(1) support for social interaction among co-authors and commenters; (2) support for cognitive aspects of co-authoring and external commenting; and (3) support for practicality in both types of interaction. For each of these issues, the paper describes the approach the PREP editor takes to address them. GOALS OF THE RESEARCHThe goal of this project is to develop a "work in preparation" (PREP) editor, a multi-user environment to support a variety of collaborative and, in particular, co-authoring and commenting relationships for scholarly communication. In our research, we do not focus on collaborations in which co-authors or commenters interact at the same time, though systems that support research into the issues such collaborations raise are clearly valuable [StefS7]. Our focus is on enhancing the effectiveness of loosely-coupled collaboration. We focus on co-authoring because it represents an interesting challenge for collaborative work over networks: co-authors, after all, must share a planning environment that often relies on, but is nonetheless richer than a working draft. We focus on commenting because it poses a challenge for communication within authoring groups as well as between external readers and such groups. We focus on scholarly communication because scholarly communities as they exist today are already collaborative work groups. They are not explicitly organized around single, concrete goals, but members of groups share the common goal of advancing the state of knowledge. Such work groups are organized in local settings, but they also interact intensively at a distance, as members of a common "invisible college" [Cran72]. ISSUES IN SUPPORTlNG CO-AUTHORING AND COMMENTINGThe PREP editor we are developing addresses three issues: (1) support for social interaction among co-authors and commenters; (2) support for cognitive aspects of coauthoring and external commenting; and (3) support for practicality in both types of interaction.

The interdisciplinary study of coordination

“…Managing task / subtask Polymer (Croft and Lefkowitz, 1988) relationship (goal decomposition) Group decision-making gIBIS (Conklin and Begeman, 1988) Group decision-making Sibyl (Lee, 1990) electronic meeting rooms (e.g., Stefik, et al, 1987;Dennis, et al, 1988;DeSanctis & Gallupe, 1987) Communication Electronic mail, Computer conferencing (e.g., Lotus, 1989) electronic meeting rooms (e.g., Stefik, et al, 1987;Dennis, et al, 1988;DeSanctis and Gallupe, 1987) Information Lens collaborative authoring tools (e.g., Fish, et al, 1988;Ellis, et al, 1990;Neuwirth, et al, 1990) Table 4. A taxonomy of cooperative work tools based on the processes they support assign tasks), but we have categorized the systems here according to the processes they explicitly emphasize.…”

Security automation considered harmful?

“…For example, in a study of a networked video conferencing and awareness system, Dourish and Bellotti [14] note that the predefined policies embedded in roles tend to be relatively static and are not a workable solution for many real-world uses. Neuwirth, et al, [31] describing a role-based collaborative writing tool, note how the cost of setting up and maintaining the constantly shifting role relationships quickly outweighs any potential benefit to be had from the access control system. Smetters and Grinter [44] and others have noted similarly problematic experiences of assigning and using roles for access control mechanisms that govern the interaction of human principals.…”

A NARRATIVE APPROACH TO COLLABORATIVE WRITING - A Business Process Model

“…The resulting groupware and the World Wide Web have revolutionized the art of writing together. In preparation for this paper, CW software such as PREP (Neuwirth et al, 1990) were studied and newer technologies such as Wikis were experimented with (JotSpot, 2004). …”