When articles were published in hard-copy newspapers, reader response was left to the ultimate in asynchronous communication: letters to the editor for differences of opinion, and corrections when a mistake was discovered. As brick-and-mortar newspapers moved into the digital realm, the static publishing model initially stuck, albeit with an easier method for correcting mistakes. When [...]
I’ll be hosting a Semantic Mediawiki workshop at MIT this upcoming Saturday and Sunday May 22/23 and invite you to attend. Semantic Mediawiki has made some significant progress on a topic I consider vital—helping end-users manage structured information. Semantic Mediawiki tackles this problem by adding a database to the Mediawiki platform (which runs Wikipedia) and [...]
Our list.it note-taking plug-in for Firefox got a very nice review in the New York Times from the ReadWriteWeb blog today. This tool has been our research group’s most successful by far, with over 14,000 users at last count. I find this both surprising and wonderful. Suprising, because when you look at the tool, it [...]
Boston has a storied history in human-computer interaction research. Vannevar Bush designed the Memex and Ivan Sutherland developed Sketchpad here. The Tangible Bits vision was authored here. Boston has hosted more CHI conferences than any other city. Now we’re ready for the next step. Recently, the New England area has seen a burst of hires [...]
A few weeks ago Adam and I blogged about some of our recent work investigating how link-sharing happens on the web. In contrast to most sharing tools out there, which broadcast your shares to anyone who will listen, we found that lots of sharing happens point-to-point, from friend to friend. An interesting outcome of this [...]
Many years ago I discovered NoteWorthy Composer, and I’ve been using it for music notation ever since. Unfortunately, I find that NoteWorthy doesn’t scale very well in several important dimensions. In particular, it lacks the ability to: Let the user manipulate multiple staves at once (even just for copying/cutting and pasting a horizontal section of [...]
I am in a state of transition: from Java to OCaml. I like Java as a platform primarily for its matureness, static typing, and great IDE integration (Netbeans in particular). But lately I’ve been finding myself manipulating a lot of tree structures—ASTs, query plans, nested relations, automatically generated GUI layouts—and Java is just too verbose. [...]
Today, we rely increasingly on the Web for a multitude of everyday activities that run the gamut from simple queries to complex social interactions. As a result, our browsing patterns are starting to reflect the intricate and multi-faceted nature of our daily lives, but web browsers retain little of the nuanced richness of this information [...]
Last April we presented results at CHI 2009 about how people used List-It, our open source Firefox plugin when it was released in September 2008. Since this initial study, we’ve had quite a few more users – we just hit our 13,000th registered account on September 1st, 2009! More importantly, more than 600 people have [...]
For non-programmers, spreadsheets are usually the option of choice when it comes to keeping track of non-trivial amounts of structured data. This is seen in all kinds of settings ranging from the business world to public administration and academic research. Spreadsheets, however, can only capture one kind of data structure: separate tabular views of the [...]