The focus of this course is on visualization to facilitate browsing and querying of the WWW and other hyper-linked information spaces. The major emphasis is on visual "road maps" which show the relationships between pages or collections of pages. Such road maps may be literal or metaphorical: we will use wayfinding and metaphor literature to provide a grounding in these two concepts. We will identify typical navigational tasks so that various road maps can be evaluated on the basis of which task they support particularly well. Other topics include visualizations to present the result of queries, automatic generation of road maps, and experimental comparisons of various information space representations.
The course will be organized around a series of readings from the literature. We will draw from some psychological, cartographic and architectural wayfinding literature, and then move on for most of the course to papers from Communications of the ACM, the ACM conferences on Hypertext, the CHI (Computer-Human Interaction) conferences, the UIST (User Interface Software) Symposiums, and similar meetings.
We will have two guest lectures and several guest presentations in the course. One guest lecture will be by Keith Andrews from the Graz University of Technology. Keith lead the Harmony project (the browser for the Hyper-G system) for several years. He currently leads the VRweb VRML viewer project. The second guest lecture will be by Jay D. Bolter, who will talk about visual representation of structure in electronic space.
Planned guest presentations are by Eric Ayers, who will talk about the Graphical History Browser, Veerasamy Aravindan who will describe his query visualization tool and Andy Woods, who will talk about the Narcissus system.
In addition to reading the papers and being actively involved in class discussions, students will do two assignments and write a term paper:
Dr. Dieberger's interests are in hypertext and human factors for information systems (user interface issues). In his Ph.D. thesis, he studied what user interface designers can learn from psychology, city planning, architecture and related fields to support navigation using a city metaphor. Current work is with textual virtual environments (MUDs and MOOs) that can be used as a framework for experimenting with spatial metaphors, also for the WWW. In September 1994 he organized a workshop on spatial metaphors for information systems at the European Conference on Hypertext (ECHT'94) in Edinburgh, Scotland.
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last modified on 4/19/96
Andreas Dieberger