Passages through time: chronicling users' information interaction history by recording when and what they read

ABSTRACT

The Passages system enhances information management by maintaining a detailed chronicle of all the text the user ever reads or edits, and making this chronicle available for rich temporal queries about the user's information workspace. Passages enables queries like, "which papers and web pages did I read when writing the 'related work' section of this paper?", and, "which of the emails in this folder have I skimmed, but not yet read in detail?" As time and interaction history are important attributes in users' recall of their personal information, effectively supporting them creates useful possibilities for information retrieval. We present methods to collect and make sense of the large volume of text with which the user interacts. We show through user evaluation the accuracy of Passages in building interaction history, and illustrate its capacity to both improve existing retrieval systems and enable novel ways to characterize document activity across time.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Graphical user interfaces (GUI)

General Terms:
Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
context, information retrieval, time-machine computing