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University of Southampton Research Repository ePrints Soton Copyright © and Moral Rights for this thesis are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder/s. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given e.g. AUTHOR (year of submission) "Full thesis title", University of Southampton, name of the University School or Department, PhD Thesis, pagination http://eprints.soton.ac.uk UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON Improving Users’ Awareness Interactions in the Collaborative Document Authoring Process: The CAWS Approach by Ilaria Liccardi A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science Department of Electronics and Computer Science United Kingdom. February 2010 ABSTRACT Awareness of individual and group activities is critical to successful collaborative authoring. Participants require knowledge of what other contributors are doing and have done, what meaningful changes have been made to a document, and who is editing each section of a document and why. With this information, group dynamics can be improved and members can work more efficiently toward the final product. In this thesis, key problems in collaborative activities are identified through a review of previous research on the subject and from field research of authors engaged in collaborative work. From these initial observations we deduce that many problems in collaborative writing occur due to technology that hinders the proper distribution of information to members of the group. The concept of “awareness”, identified in past research, is discussed, and used as a model to explain the underlying causes behind these common problems. As a specific example of the importance of communication and coordination mechanisms, an analysis is presented of the Wikibooks website, an online collaborative writing site that allows volunteers to work together to develop free textbooks. Statistical analysis of historical data from the site is used to correlate successful books with efficient use of planning, communication and coordination techniques. These results help to further cement the importance of communication and awareness channels. From analysis of these issues, a set of requirements is defined for an effective collaboration tool, specifically the features that such a tool should include in order to support the types of awareness that are necessary for successful collaboration. Existing groupware systems are compared and judged against these requirements, with the discovery that most systems lack support for many different types of awareness. To investigate the subject further, a prototype co-authoring system with features to support awareness (CAWS), developed as part of this research, is described. It is explained how these features attempt to reproduce some of the communications channels implicitly present within an office environment. The results of a usability study using the CAWS system are then presented, with particular reference to the effectiveness of the features of the system. Feedback from participants was gathered with respect to usefulness and ease of gathering information about other users‟ progress and interactions with the workspace with these features present. Finally the observations, findings and the implications of a real world groupware evaluation are presented (undertaken over a period of 17 weeks with 85 students divided into 15 groups). The groupware evaluation gives insight into the effectiveness of awareness mechanisms. This includes the role and effect of planning, the effect of the choice of tool on perceptions of awareness, the relative importance of awareness and how awareness contributes to a successful collaboration. We discuss the outcomes of the research with respect to the research questions and contribution, presenting how the research could be continued in the future. II Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge several people who have provided inspiration as well as help throughout the development of this thesis. This thesis would have not been able to see a conclusion without the continuous encouragement of my first supervisor Prof. Hugh C. Davis, who for the duration of the Ph.D allowed me to expand my knowledge and expose my work to the Computer Supported Collaborate Work (CSCW) and the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) communities. I would also like to thank my second supervisor Dr. Su A. White for help and support, comments and invaluable suggestions in writing this thesis. I would also like to thank Prof. Carl Gutwin from the University of Saskatchewan for his insight and comments on my research and for his work in the CSCW community in the field related to awareness of users engaged in collaborative authoring. I would like to thank the Web Science Research Initiative for awarding me the grant money to attend the WebScience Summer School at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford, since these two weeks provided insight into the research area from a social and technical prospective. I would also like to thank the WSRI for funding my three month stay at MIT. My deepest and warmest thanks go to Professor Hal Abelson at MIT. Apart from his continuous inspiration to me in the fields of privacy issues and web technology, he also provided extremely useful and inspirational insights into the research topic, specifically the suggestion of a large scale analysis of Wikibooks. He was also extremely helpful in the design of my experiments, and in addition to his helpful insights and comments he introduced me to Prof. Wanda J. Orlikowski at MIT Sloan School and Professor Wendy E. Mackay at Université de Paris-Sud (INRIA). I would like to thank Prof. Orlikowski for providing useful insight into the general evaluation of group dynamics. I would also like to thank the all the members of the DIG Group at MIT, for their insights into the research in general and for how to prove/disprove the hypothesis. To name a few, these include Dr. Lalana Kagal, and Oshani Seneviratne for her comments on the CAWS tool and suggestions for how the semantic web might be used to improve III its effectiveness. I would also like to thank Prof. Sir Tim Berners-Lee for his insight into the features of the tool. Professor Wendy MacKay was instrumental in the completion of this Ph.D, because of her suggestions and help in various parts of the work. I would like to thank Professor Mackay and Au Yeung Ching Man for collaborating in the Wikibooks work. Au Yeung Ching Man was instrumental in measuring redundancy behaviour in the book dataset (Chapter 4). Professor Mackay helped refine the idea as well as collaborate on the chapter. She provided constant insight in the last year of this research, providing different points of view on the research in general and was extremely helpful in designing the final experiment (Chapter 9). I would also like to thank Dr. Dave Woods for his help and patience in the relation to the design of the experiments. He was extremely helpful in making me understand the different factors affecting groups of users and how these should be tested, and was instrumental in the design of the first usability study (Chapter 8) as well as his comments in the final experiment (Chapter 9). I would like to thank Dr. Michael R. Poppleton and Dr Robert J. Walters for their help in running the experiments as well as the second year computer science students who patiently undertook each stage of the study. I would also like my dear friend Asma for her support throughout the course of my Ph.D. I would also like to thank my mother and father without whom I would not have been able to do this, for their love, their never-ending support, and for always understanding me. My final and most important thanks goes to Simon, for his love, his never ending support and infinite patience through the entire course of study, without whom I would not have been able to have the satisfaction of writing this thesis. IV To Simon, my parents (Gianni and Maria), my brother Gianmaria, my uncle Giovanni, my aunt Giulia (who is missed dearly every day), my two cousins (Mariangela and Giuseppe) and the entire remainder of my family. V List of Publications (13) Article (2) Liccardi, I., Ounnas, A., Pau, R., Massey, E., Kinnumen, P., Lewthwaite, S., Midy, M. A. and Sakar, C. (2007) The role of social networks in students‟ learning experiences. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin (December Issue) pp.224-237. Liccardi, I., Davis, H. and White, S. (2008) CAWS: Visualizing awareness to improve the effectiveness of co-authoring activities. Special issue of Collaborative Computing in IEEE Distributed Systems Online pp. 6-12. Doctoral Consortium (1) Liccardi, I. (2007) CAWS: Improving users‟ awareness for advancing effectiveness of co-authoring activities. In Proceedings of ACM GROUP 2007 Doctoral Colloquium, Sanibel Island, Florida. Short papers (7) Liccardi I., Hugh C. Davis, Su White, Progressional awareness: designing a co- authoring tool to support the planning process, ACM SIGDOC 2009, 5-7 October, Indianapolis, IL, USA, pages 115-118. Liccardi I., Hugh C. Davis, Su White, Behavioral awareness for modeling social interactions in online collaborative authoring environments, WebSci 2009: Society On-Line, 18–20 March, Athens, Greece. Liccardi, I., Davis, H. and White, S. (2008) CAWS: an awareness based wiki system to improve team collaboration. In: ICALT 2008: The 8th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning, 1-5 July, Santander, Cantabria, Spain, 265-267.