Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services
Скачать книги из серии Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and ServicesIncidental Exposure to Online News
Rapid technological changes and availability of news anywhere and at any moment have changed how people seek out news. Increasingly, consumers no longer take deliberate actions to read the news, instead stumbling upon news online. While the emergence of serendipitous news discovery online has been recognized in the literature, there is a limited understanding about how people experience this behavior. Based on the mixed method study that investigated online news reading behavior of residents in a Midwestern U.S. town, we explore how people accidentally discover news when engaged in various online activities. Employing the grounded theory approach, we define Incidental Exposure to Online News (IEON) as individual's memorable experiences of chance encounters with interesting, useful, or surprising news while using the Internet for news browsing or for non-news-related online activities, such as checking email or visiting social networking sites. The book presents a conceptual framework of IEON that advances research and an understanding of serendipitous news discovery from people's holistic experiences of news consumption in their everyday lives. The proposed IEON Process Model identifies key steps in an IEON experience that could help news reporters and developers of online news platforms create innovative storytelling and design strategies to catch consumers' attention during their online activities. Finally, this book raises important methodological questions for further investigation: how should serendipitous news discovery be studied, measured, and observed, and what are the essential elements that differentiate this behavior from other types of online news consumption and information behaviors?
On the Efficient Determination of Most Near Neighbors
The time-worn aphorism «close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades» is clearly inadequate. Close also counts in golf, shuffleboard, archery, darts, curling, and other games of accuracy in which hitting the precise center of the target isn't to be expected every time, or in which we can expect to be driven from the target by skilled opponents.
This book is not devoted to sports discussions, but to efficient algorithms for determining pairs of closely related web pages—and a few other situations in which we have found that inexact matching is good enough – where proximity suffices. We will not, however, attempt to be comprehensive in the investigation of probabilistic algorithms, approximation algorithms, or even techniques for organizing the discovery of nearest neighbors. We are more concerned with finding nearby neighbors; if they are not particularly close by, we are not particularly interested.
In thinking of when approximation is sufficient, remember the oft-told joke about two campers sitting around after dinner. They hear noises coming towards them. One of them reaches for a pair of running shoes, and starts to don them. The second then notes that even with running shoes, they cannot hope to outrun a bear, to which the first notes that most likely the bear will be satiated after catching the slower of them. We seek problems in which we don't need to be faster than the bear, just faster than the others fleeing the bear.
Building a Better World with our Information
Personal Information Management (PIM) is the art of getting things done in our lives through information. How do we – can we better – manage our information at home, at school, at work, at play and “@large” in a global community? How do we use information not only to know but also to represent, communicate and effect useful change in the world around us? In the study of PIM, does the search for practical methods with practical impact lead to methods that are «massive open on-line»? Can the ancient practice of storytelling help us better to weave our fragmented information together? In the practice of PIM, how can our information best serve as «near knowledge» – close at hand and, through our information tools, serving in practical ways to extend the knowledge that's «in the head»? If attempts to multitask lead to ineffective, even dangerous, instances of task switching and divided attention, can better PIM help us to realize, instead, opportunities for «multi-goaling» where the same time and effort accomplishes not just one but several goals? These and other questions are addressed in this third and final book to conclude the series on «The Future of Personal Information Management». Part 1, «Our Information, Always and Forever», covered the fundamentals of PIM and then explored the seismic shift, already well underway, towards a world where our information is always at hand (thanks to our devices) and «forever» on the web. Part 2, «Transforming Technologies to Manage Our Information», provided a more focused look at technologies for managing information. The opening chapter discussed «natural interface» technologies of input/output to free us from keyboard, screen and mouse. Successive chapters then explored technologies to save, search and structure our information. A concluding chapter introduced the possibility that we may see dramatic reductions in the «clerical tax» we pay as we work with our information. Now in Part 3, «Building a Better World with Our Information», focus shifts to the practical present and to the near future. Part 3 is in three chapters: • Group information management and the social fabric in PIM. How do we preserve and promote our PIM practices as we interact with others at home, at work, at play and in wider, even global, communities? (Chapter 10). • Designing for PIM in the development of tools and in the selection of teachable (learnable) «better practices» of PIM. (Chapter 11). • To each of us, our own concludes with an exploration of the ways each of us, individually, can develop better practices for the management of our information in service of the lives we wish to live and towards a better world we all must share. (Chapter 12).
Designing for Digital Reading
Reading is a complex human activity that has evolved, and co-evolved, with technology over thousands of years. Mass printing in the fifteenth century firmly established what we know as the modern book, with its physical format of covers and paper pages, and now-standard features such as page numbers, footnotes, and diagrams. Today, electronic documents are enabling paperless reading supported by eReading technologies such as Kindles and Nooks, yet a high proportion of users still opt to print on paper before reading. This persistent habit of «printing to read» is one sign of the shortcomings of digital documents – although the popularity of eReaders is one sign of the shortcomings of paper. How do we get the best of both worlds?
The physical properties of paper (for example, it is light, thin, and flexible) contribute to the ease with which physical documents are manipulated; but these properties have a completely different set of affordances to their digital equivalents. Paper can be folded, ripped, or scribbled on almost subconsciously – activities that require significant cognitive attention in their digital form, if they are even possible. The nearly subliminal interaction that comes from years of learned behavior with paper has been described as lightweight interaction, which is achieved when a person actively reads an article in a way that is so easy and unselfconscious that they are not apt to remember their actions later.
Reading is now in a period of rapid change, and digital text is fast becoming the predominant mode of reading. As a society, we are merely at the start of the journey of designing truly effective tools for handling digital text.
This book investigates the advantages of paper, how the affordances of paper can be realized in digital form, and what forms best support lightweight interaction for active reading. To understand how to design for the future, we review the ways reading technology and reader behavior have both changed and remained constant over hundreds of years. We explore the reasoning behind reader behavior and introduce and evaluate several user interface designs that implement these lightweight properties familiar from our everyday use of paper.
We start by looking back, reviewing the development of reading technology and the progress of research on reading over many years. Drawing key concepts from this review, we move forward to develop and test methods for creating new and more effective interactions for supporting digital reading. Finally, we lay down a set of lightweight attributes which can be used as evidence-based guidelines to improve the usability of future digital reading technologies. By the end of this book, then, we hope you will be equipped to critique the present state of digital reading, and to better design and evaluate new interaction styles and technologies.
Table of Contents: Preface / Acknowledgments / Figure Credits / Introduction / Reading Through the Ages / Key Concepts / Lightweight Interactions / Improving Digital Reading / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies
Transforming Technologies to Manage Our Information
With its theme, «Our Information, Always and Forever,» Part I of this book covers the basics of personal information management (PIM) including six essential activities of PIM and six (different) ways in which information can be personal to us. Part I then goes on to explore key issues that arise in the «great migration» of our information onto the Web and into a myriad of mobile devices.
Part 2 provides a more focused look at technologies for managing information that promise to profoundly alter our practices of PIM and, through these practices, the way we lead our lives.
Part 2 is in five chapters:
– Chapter 5. Technologies of Input and Output. Technologies in support of gesture, touch, voice, and even eye movements combine to support a more natural user interface (NUI). Technologies of output include glasses and «watch» watches. Output will also increasingly be animated with options to «zoom».
– Chapter 6. Technologies to Save Our Information. We can opt for «life logs» to record our experiences with increasing fidelity. What will we use these logs for? And what isn’t recorded that should be?
– Chapter 7. Technologies to Search Our Information. The potential for personalized search is enormous and mostly yet to be realized. Persistent searches, situated in our information landscape, will allow us to maintain a diversity of projects and areas of interest without a need to continually switch from one to another to handle incoming information.
– Chapter 8. Technologies to Structure Our Information. Structure is key if we are to keep, find, and make effective use of our information. But how best to structure? And how best to share structured information between the applications we use, with other people, and also with ourselves over time? What lessons can we draw from the failures and successes in web-based efforts to share structure?
– Chapter 9. PIM Transformed and Transforming: Stories from the Past, Present and Future. Part 2 concludes with a comparison between Licklider’s world of information in 1957 and our own world of information today. And then we consider what the world of information is likely to look like in 2057. Licklider estimated that he spent 85% of his «thinking time» in activities that were clerical and mechanical and might (someday) be delegated to the computer. What percentage of our own time is spent with the clerical and mechanical? What about in 2057?
Table of Contents: Technologies of Input and Output / Technologies to Save Our Information / Technologies to Search Our Information / Technologies to Structure Our Information / PIM Transformed and Transforming: Stories from the Past, Present, and Future
Visual Information Retrieval using Java and LIRE
Visual information retrieval (VIR) is an active and vibrant research area, which attempts at providing means for organizing, indexing, annotating, and retrieving visual information (images and videos) from large, unstructured repositories.
The goal of VIR is to retrieve matches ranked by their relevance to a given query, which is often expressed as an example image and/or a series of keywords. During its early years (1995-2000), the research efforts were dominated by content-based approaches contributed primarily by the image and video processing community. During the past decade, it was widely recognized that the challenges imposed by the lack of coincidence between an image's visual contents and its semantic interpretation, also known as semantic gap, required a clever use of textual metadata (in addition to information extracted from the image's pixel contents) to make image and video retrieval solutions efficient and effective. The need to bridge (or at least narrow) the semantic gap has been one of the driving forces behind current VIR research. Additionally, other related research problems and market opportunities have started to emerge, offering a broad range of exciting problems for computer scientists and engineers to work on.
In this introductory book, we focus on a subset of VIR problems where the media consists of images, and the indexing and retrieval methods are based on the pixel contents of those images – an approach known as content-based image retrieval (CBIR). We present an implementation-oriented overview of CBIR concepts, techniques, algorithms, and figures of merit. Most chapters are supported by examples written in Java, using Lucene (an open-source Java-based indexing and search implementation) and LIRE (Lucene Image REtrieval), an open-source Java-based library for CBIR.
Reading and Writing the Electronic Book
Developments over the last twenty years have fueled considerable speculation about the future of the book and of reading itself. This book begins with a gloss over the history of electronic books, including the social and technical forces that have shaped their development. The focus then shifts to reading and how we interact with what we read: basic issues such as legibility, annotation, and navigation are examined as aspects of reading that ebooks inherit from their print legacy. Because reading is fundamentally communicative, I also take a closer look at the sociality of reading: how we read in a group and how we share what we read. Studies of reading and ebook use are integrated throughout the book, but Chapter 5 «goes meta» to explore how a researcher might go about designing his or her own reading-related studies.
No book about ebooks is complete without an explicit discussion of content preparation, i.e., how the electronic book is written. Hence, Chapter 6 delves into the underlying representation of ebooks and efforts to create and apply markup standards to them. This chapter also examines how print genres have made the journey to digital and how some emerging digital genres might be realized as ebooks. Finally, Chapter 7 discusses some beyond-the-book functionality: how can ebook platforms be transformed into portable personal libraries? In the end, my hope is that by the time the reader reaches the end of this book, he or she will feel equipped to perform the next set of studies, write the next set of articles, invent new ebook functionality, or simply engage in a heated argument with the stranger in seat 17C about the future of reading.
