A story-based approach to making sense of documents

Many modern organizations make use of document collections as an important element of their businesses. They would like to get as much value as possible from the information stored in these collections. However, current tools are often oriented to finding and presenting individual documents; finding desired information can require examining many individual items, and users find little support for making sense of topics discussed in multiple documents, and little support for sharing their understanding with other users. This paper reports on the Document Interactions project, which takes a story-based approach to making sense of documents. It combines a tool for creating stories from documents and images, with a virtual reality system in which users can present and discuss these stories. We also report on two studies: an ethnographic study of story use in a history museum and a study in which museum staff evaluated our tools.

Citation

Bier, E. A.; Janssen, W. C.; Wall, P.; Karlsson, J.; Sun, T.; Peng, W.; Langford, Z. A story-based approach to making sense of documents. 6th IASTED International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction; 2011 May 16-18; Washington, DC.