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mingana.tex Click here to view linked References 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Touching Annotations: A Visual Metaphor for 10 11 Navigation of Annotation in Digital Documents 12 13 14 C.P.Bowers∗, C.Creed, B.R.Cowan, R. Beale 15 16 Human-Computer Interaction Centre, School of Computer Science, University of 17 Birmingham, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK 18 19 20 21 22 23 Abstract 24 25 Direct touch manipulation interactions with technology are now common- 26 place and significant interest is building around their use in the culture and 27 heritage domain. Such interactions can give people the opportunity to ex- 28 plore materials and artifacts in ways that would otherwise be unavailable. 29 30 These are often heavily annotated and can be linked to a large array of re- 31 lated digital content, thus enriching the experience for the user. Research has 32 addressed issues of how to present digital documents and their related anno- 33 34 tations but at present it is unclear what the optimal interaction approach to 35 navigating these annotations in a touch display context might be. 36 In this paper we investigate the role of two alternative approaches to 37 support the navigation of annotations in digitised documents in the context 38 39 of a touch interface. Through a control study we demonstrate that, whilst 40 the navigation paradigm displays a significant interaction with the type of 41 annotations task performed, there is no discernible advantage of using a 42 43 natural visual metaphor for annotation in this context. This suggests that 44 design of digital document annotation navigation tools should account for 45 the context and navigation tasks being considered. 46 47 Keywords: Document navigation, touch interaction, affordance, interaction 48 techniques, user study 49 50 51 52 ∗Corresponding author 53 Email addresses: [email protected] (C.P.Bowers), [email protected] 54 (C.Creed), [email protected] (B.R.Cowan), [email protected] 55 (R. Beale) 56 57 58 59 Preprint submitted to Elsevier June 2, 2013 60 61 62 63 64 65 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1. Introduction 10 11 Arts and cultural organisations are increasingly making use of touch en- 12 13 abled interfaces to allow the general public to interact with precious and 14 rare artefacts. These interfaces have the potential to provide intuitive and 15 engaging experiences when interacting with digital proxies of artefacts or 16 17 manuscripts where the original physical version is inaccessible. This includes 18 situations where restrictions on the number of artefacts constrain scalability 19 and where interactions tend to hold a risk to the user or the artefact (e.g. 20 dangerous substances or rare/precious artefacts). 21 22 In particular, museums and libraries regularly scan ancient manuscripts 23 to make it possible for people to interact with digital versions of these docu- 24 ments (e.g. Turning the PagesTM). These interfaces can provide compelling 25 physical affordances allowing users to browse through documents, work col- 26 27 laboratively, and make comments or raise discussion about the material in 28 an intuitive and familiar manner (Geller, 2006; Terrenghi et al., 2007; Liesa- 29 putra and Witten, 2012). Cultural organisations are particularly interested 30 31 in collecting user generated content from the general public and visualising 32 this in a way that makes it easy to navigate and view the annotations of 33 others. 34 Annotations added to these documents are especially important as they 35 36 help the general public and scholars learn more about the history and con- 37 tent of the documents. For these historical documents, annotation plays a 38 critical role in translation, interpretation and comprehension of the content 39 40 of these documents since they are often written in ancient script that result 41 in difficult and, in some cases, multiple interpretations. Annotations can be 42 part of an ongoing dialog between multiple readers. As such annotations can 43 be gathered over the entire lifetime of a document and can include many 44 45 forms of content including initial elucidations by the original document au- 46 thor through to contemporary scholarly interpretations (Agosti et al., 2007). 47 The nature of historical documents tends to result in the generation of 48 large numbers of annotations that consist of significant amounts of cross- 49 50 referencing both to aspects of the document and to other annotations. In 51 order to gain a full appreciation of a documents content these numerous an- 52 notations must be presented in an intuitive and easily accessible way without 53 54 being overwhelming. 55 Traditionally annotations have consisted of notes hand-written directly 56 onto the original page, appended to the page in the form of a physically 57 58 59 2 60 61 62 63 64 65 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Figure 1: Use of thumbnails to support navigation between pages 30 31 32 TM 33 attached note (e.g. Post-it notes) or held in a seperate document utilis- 34 ing some suitable form of cross-referencing (e.g. page & line number). For 35 digitised documents, whose origins predate many of the technical innova- 36 tions in interweaving digital knowledge content through hyper-referencing, 37 38 any enhancement must be appended to the original document. However, it 39 remains unclear what the optimal interaction approach is in this context and 40 in particular how users should navigate annotated documents on larger touch 41 42 interfaces. 43 To better support public access to these documents we investigate the 44 use of touch enabled interfaces for navigation of annotated documents. The 45 software developed to support these activities typically focuses on the re- 46 47 quirements of individual researchers working at a traditional desktop using a 48 monitor, keyboard and mouse where users see scanned document pages on a 49 screen and can navigate back and forth between pages by clicking on image 50 51 thumbnails of other pages (Robinson, 2010). Figure 1 demonstrates the use 52 of thumbnail images representing links to other document pages when view- 53 ing an historical text, whilst the current page of the text is displayed as a 54 larger image in the centre. 55 56 A number of studies have looked specifically at document navigation us- 57 58 59 3 60 61 62 63 64 65 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ing a traditional interface setup (i.e. ones using a mouse and keyboard), but 10 11 less work has focused on whether these techniques are also effective on touch 12 interfaces where users have the ability to directly manipulate and interact 13 with the document and its annotations (Buchanan and Owen, 2008; Cock- 14 burn et al., 2006). The use of touch interfaces presents the opportunity to 15 16 utilise real world metaphors and affordances that can create a more familiar 17 interaction experience for users, yet it remains unclear whether this is an 18 improved approach over more traditional navigation techniques. 19 20 In addition, although some effort has been made to explore the impact of 21 touch interface designs on user performance metrics (Marshall et al., 2008; 22 Shaer et al., 2011; Chiu et al., 2011), much of the research still focuses on re- 23 porting high level design solutions and qualitative evaluations. These studies, 24 25 whilst providing valuable insights, do not readily identify the causal impact 26 of interaction design choices on usability related metrics. Those quantita- 27 tive studies that have been performed tend to focus on low-level interactions 28 29 and manipulations (Cockburn et al., 2012). Consequently, little work in this 30 area has been conducted to understand how the mode of interaction with 31 annotations contribute causally to the usability of such interactions. 32 The work presented aims to investigate the usability of differing inter- 33 34 action designs in navigating digital versions of manuscripts in relation to 35 their annotations. This paper explores how the mode of interaction with 36 annotations within these documents impacts on user efficiency and usability 37 judgement when navigating the content of a document using existing annota- 38 39 tions. We start by covering related research on digital document annotation 40 and then describe an empirical investigation comparing a real world interac- 41 tion approach against a more traditional scrolling and thumbnail approach. 42 43 We then provide a discussion of the significant statistical effects found along 44 with suggestions for future research. 45 46 47 2. Related Work 48 49 Supporting the creation and navigation of annotations has been a funda- 50 mental feature of the development of digital document systems. We define 51 the term annotation to mean any additional content that is added to the 52 53 original document content. Annotations can be used to extend and enhance 54 a document in a number of ways. They can be used to summarise/simplify 55 complex content, allow cross-referencing of content, support the capture of 56 57 58 59 4 60 61 62 63 64 65 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 alternative viewpoints, perspectives or discussions and better support search 10 11 (M¨uller and Maurer, 2011). 12 An annotation can be a mix of any type of media including text, images, 13 and videos. Most research on annotation in digitial documents has focused 14 on the presentation of annotations and how the relationship between the an- 15 16 notation and the document content is supported (Chen et al., 2008; Pearson 17 et al., 2009).

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