Early Thoughts

I'd like to explore the use of visual timelines for displaying data from multiple digital sources. This is especially relevant for ethnographers today. After even a single day of observations, an ethnographer will have at least hand-written notes, digital still photos, and digital video/audio files. Currently our DCOG-HCI lab ethnographers are not using the ANOTO pen for fieldnotes, but I'll imagine a future when they do use a digital pen. Although the technology is not quite sophisticated enough for (our) ethnographers to make full use of it yet, the technology is arguably not far off. Consequently, while I'm researching this topic, I will be using the pen for my notes to try to get a feel for its benefits and drawbacks.

Let's imagine, though, that ethnographers use a digital pen for notes. Then digital time stamps could be used to sort, organize and coordinate the varius information sources they've collected over the course of the day. Ron Yeh and Scott Klemmer (at Stanford) have already implemented a program that makes use of digital time stamps to present field data side-by-side in a pretty nice interface: ButterflyNet

I'll explore ButteflyNet as I think about how this could lead into an effective timeline visualization. Where ButterflyNet links up complete data from different media sources, a timeline would provide a scalable overview of (glance at) what data is available. Maybe the timeline would provide ethnographers with a first-pass of the data, where they could quickly scroll through the full set of data to see what's available. Data points from the graph could be examined more closely by clicking on them, or even changing the scale. This might bring up the ButterflyNet program for a closer inspection of the data. (Just some early thoughts.)

The SIMILE project at MIT has developed a program for generating scalable, multi-tiered, interactive timelines. This could be a great program for displaying time-stamped digital data for our ethnographers. The lower tiers could be scaled by months, weeks or days; and the upper tiers could be scaled by hours. There could even be an upper tier for each digital media source: pen, photo, video, etc.

This coming week I'd like to begin using the ANOTO pen and begin trying out ButteflyNet. Ideally, I'd like to have a set of data similar to an ethnographer's real set for prototyping this timeline. I could either create a sample set of data, or I could use some data that Ed Hutchins and Saeko Nomura have collected. (It might be easier for the purposes of this research proposal to create a sample set.)


A few sources I will reference in researching this topic. Do you have other suggestions?

Ron B. Yeh, Chunyuan Liao, Scott R. Klemmer, François Guimbretière, Brian Lee, Boyko Kakaradov, Jeannie Stamberger, and Andreas Paepcke. ButterflyNet: A Mobile Capture and Access System for Field Biology Research. CHI: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Montréal, Québec, Canada, 2006.

Ron B. Yeh, Scott R. Klemmer, Jeannie Stamberger, and Andreas Paepcke. Mobility, Fluidity, And Physicality: A Study Of Field Biology Practices. Stanford University Computer Science Department Technical Report, CSTR, 2005.

Guimbretière, F. Paper augmented digital documents. UIST.
Vancouver, Canada: ACM Press. pp. 51-60, 2003.

SIMILE project - timeline