Impact on performance and process by a social annotation system: a social reading experiment

Social annotation systems such as SparTag.us and del.icio.us have been designed to encourage individual reading and marking behaviors that, when shared, accumulate to build collective knowledge spaces. Prior work reported on the experimental design and performance effects observed in a controlled study of SparTag.us. Study participants working independently on a sensemaking task who had access to a set of expert annotations were compared against participants using SparTag.us without those annotations and participants using only office software for annotation support. A learning effect was shown favoring the participants using existing annotations. In this paper, we consider analysis of the behavioral data captured in the experiment to further explore the causes that would explain these effects.

Citation

Nelson, L.; Convertino, G.; Pirolli, P. L.; Hong, L.; Chi, E. H. Impact on performance and process by a social annotation system: a social reading experiment. Foundations of Augmented Cognition, Proceedings of the 5th International Conference (FAC 2009), held as part of HCI International; 2009 July 19-24; San Diego, CA. Berlin: Springer; 2009; Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 5638: 128-137.