Building and sharing digital group histories

ABSTRACT

Recent advances have made it easy to amass large collections of digital recordings of our daily lives. The Personal Digital Historian Project (PDH) is an ongoing effort to help people organize and navigate digital collections in order to reflect on and share their experiences. The PDH interface employs a table-top display containing a circular interface, which allows people to interact with each other as well as their data. We have developed a group history of our own research lab as the first application of PDH. This case study motivated several new extensions to PDH, including methods for branching off from and returning to various conversational threads, discovering relevant information, and incorporating background contexts to enable flexible story sharing. A primary finding of our user evaluation was that people were able to focus on and enjoy their conversation and the data, rather than concentrate on operating the PDH system.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces
          Subjects: Collaborative computing

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.3 Communications Applications
          Subjects: Computer conferencing, teleconferencing, and videoconferencing

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.8 PERSONAL COMPUTING
      K.8.2 Hardware

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors, Performance