RichReview

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel document annotation system that aims to enable the kinds of rich communication that usually only occur in face-to-face meetings. Our system, RichReview, lets users create annotations on top of digital documents using three main modalities: freeform inking, voice for narration, and deictic gestures in support of voice. RichReview uses novel visual representations and timesynchronization between modalities to simplify annotation access and navigation. Moreover, RichReview's versatile support for multi-modal annotations enables users to mix and interweave different modalities in threaded conversations. A formative evaluation demonstrates early promise for the system finding support for voice, pointing, and the combination of both to be especially valuable. In addition, initial findings point to the ways in which both content and social context affect modality choice.

SpaceInk: Making Space for In-Context Annotations

“…The approach lets users integrate in-context annotations tightly with the document's content, which is particularly efficient when collaborating with other users. RichReview [37] implements TextTearing techniques coupled with the capability to record speech and deictic gestures associated with their annotations to facilitate communication between co-workers.…”

“…The HCI community has already started studying the problem of embedding annotations into reflowable documents such as Web pages. It has investigated several questions: how to store annotations and access them later on [26]; how to reconcile them with their scope when a Web page's content changes [4]; how to share them with other people [5,37].…”

“…This is an elegant solution, but because of the high variability in handwriting and annotating, it is unclear in our context which criteria could effectively disambiguate between the two types of inks. The very same variability makes pigtail delimiters [15], as used in TextTearing [36,37], prone to false activations. For instance, a curly bracket might get confused with a pigtail gesture.…”

“…Annotations are central to active reading. They are a means to emphasize and memorize specific pieces of information, to facilitate re-reading, to identify passages to revise and suggest edits, or to support sense-making [24,19,37,27]. When annotating a document, people make ink marks directly on the content: they underline words, they draw links between related items, they circle elements in figures.…”

DeepWriting

“…Furthermore many domain specific applications have been proposed. For instance, manipulation of handdrawn diagrams [3] and geometric shapes [2], note-taking (e.g., NiCEBook [6]), sharing of notes (e.g., NotePals [13]), browsing and annotation of multimedia content [54], including digital documents [58] using a stylus. Others have explored creation, management and annotation of handwritten notes on large screen displays [39,56].…”