The lab has been involved in hypertext research for a number of years. Areas of particular interest include models of information exploration, developed in collaboration with John Waterworth, formerly of the Institute of Systems Science in Singapore and now at the University of Umeå.

Work has also been done on developing information exploration systems that integrate query and browsing, beginning with the thesis by Golovchinsky and also described in papers at INTERCHI '93 and Hypertext '93. This work was funded by ITRC in a project headed by Professor Frank Tompa of the University of Waterloo.

We have also applied the same interface technology to a web browser based on Mosaic. This work is part of our MultiSurf project that explores navigation aides for browsing the World Wide Web. A brief summary is available.

Research has also been done on recognizing landmarks in hypermedia (Valdez, Chignell, and Glenn, 1988) and on mental models of hypermedia (Teshiba and Chignell, 1988).

In his Ph.D research, summarized in Valdez and Chignell (1992), Felix Valdez demonstrated that nonlinear and linear navigation occurs in both printed text and hypertext in roughly the same proportions (60/40 in favour of linear navigation). This finding provides the motivation for our recent emphasis on the development of information exploration systems that combine linear and non-linear navigation.

Other research has looked at the relationship between authors and readers in hypertext. Brown developed the Anchors Aweigh system which was used in experiments that compared the types of links created by authors with the types of links actually read by readers (Baron, Brown, and Chignell, 1994). The results showed that there are strong individual differences in link usage: some people strongly prefer to use semantic links, while others strongly prefer rhetorical links.

Desktop virtual reality (VR) offers a powerful environment for visualizing structure in large information sets. In well-designed virtual worlds, users can employ skills from navigating in real environments. Recent joint research has developed and tested of a series of prototype VR worlds, designed to support navigation during information visualization and retrieval. Among other results so far, users’ subjectively rated sense of presence, ease of use and preference were all affected by degree of spatial cueing, but objective target-hunting performance was not. The virtual world with the strongest spatial cues caused poorer user performance than a comparable hypertext interface, but the virtual world was rated as more enjoyable. The final VR prototype was not significantly worse than hypertext in user performance; the prototype demonstrates the potential for designing navigable VR that is engaging, enjoyable and productive for everyday information exploration. Continuing research will pursue issues raised in this project.

The Interactive Media Lab (formerly known as the Multimedia Usability Lab) has been researching large-scale text browsing (aka information retrieval interfaces) since 1991. This research has been sponsored by ITRC, and has involved research collaborations with Frank Tompa ( Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waterloo) and Alberto Mendelzon and Ron Baecker (Dept. of Computer Science, University of Toronto).

The approach that we have taken has been to add value to information retrieval systems through the development of innovative user interfaces. Here is a brief list of the research highlights over the past few years.

• 1993 Markup based querying system (QRL) developed by Gene Golovchinsky
   
  
• 1994 ST-PATREC system developed by Charoenkitkarn and Golovchinsky. Participation at TREC-3 demonstrated that markup based querying could be effective.
   
  
• 1995-96 Development of BrowsIR system used to demonstrate the effectiveness of markup based querying on a large (2 gigabyte) document set. Results at TREC-4 again showed that the approach is viable. Charoenkitkarn's PhD research showed that markup based querying was particularly helpful for novices.
   
  
• 1995 MultiSurf system developed by Hasan, Noik, Golovchinsky, and Charoenkitkarn. A Web browser was implemented with markup based querying and associated structure and query visualizations.
   
  
• 1996 VOIR system developed by Gene Golovchinsky implements an electronic newspaper interface for large text databases, with embedded dynamic hypertext. Golovchinsky's Ph.D reports on experiments showing that novices (versus IR experts) benefit more from the use of dynamic hypertext in information retrieval tasks.
   
  
• 1996-97 Rick Bodner implements the dynamic hypertext system as a Web browser (DynaWeb). Jim Tam, in his Ph.D, shows that DynaWeb is superior to static hypertext for a question answering task using the Bible as the text source. Tam also shows that novices benefit more from using the dynamic hypertext than do domain experts (bible scholars).

Our emphasis in 1997 is on using PDAs and handheld computers as front-ends to the Web-based dynamic hypertext system, and developing a version of DynaWeb that can be used with corporate intranets. We would be happy to talk to people in industry about the possibility of working on joint projects involving this research.

Related publications

The research on multimedia authoring has been sponsored by ITRC in collaboration with Professor Alberto Mendelson in the Dept. of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. A summary of recent work on that project is provided in a paper published in CASCON '95. Additional research on multimedia is carried out by Professor Ron Baecker of Computer Science.

Related publications

Video analysis research, sponsored by Ricoh Corporation, is focusing on video analysis tools for usability engineering (Chignell, Motoyama and Melo, 1995). The Video Exploratory Sequential Data Analysis (VESDA) tool is described in the paper by Harrison and Chignell (1993), which also discusses VANNA, its predecessor. Another video analysis tool that is widely distributed is MacShapa, developed by Professor Penny Sanderson at the University of Illinois.

Related publications.