George Buchanan

City, University of London · Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design

Mapping between different representations of similar data is a common challenge in digital humanities (DH). In practical DH collections, the ‘person’ is an essential and centric unit and other parts could link to the ‘person’ to form the knowledge base. However, there is still no general and useful person‐oriented ontology in DH community. Many pra...

Background: Many older adults now use technologies such as wearable devices and telehealth services to support their health and well-being while living independently at home. However, older adults vary in how they use these technologies, and there is a lack of knowledge regarding the motivations that influence their acceptance and use of health-re...

Publication is a vital part of the career of any researcher. There is an increasing awareness that the presented gender of authors can impact their acceptance at competitive venues, and also influence the support they receive to participate in conferences. Similarly, geography and the associated costs of travel to conferences also impact the likeli...

BACKGROUND Many older adults now use technologies such as wearable devices and telehealth services to support their health and well-being while living independently at home. However, older adults vary in how they use these technologies, and there is a lack of knowledge regarding the motivations that influence their acceptance and use of health-rela...

BACKGROUND The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic caused a surge in the usage of Telehealth Platforms. Psychologists have shifted from face-to-face to Videoconference sessions. As a result, essential information easily obtainable via in-person sessions may be missing. Consequently, the therapeutic work could be compromised. OBJECTIVE This research aimed to explo...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic caused a surge in the use of telehealth platforms. Psychologists have shifted from face-to-face sessions to videoconference sessions. Therefore, essential information that is easily obtainable via in-person sessions may be missing. Consequently, therapeutic work could be compromised. Objective This study aimed to e...

BACKGROUND Transient migrants such as international students have received limited support from host-country governments throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. An increase in misinformation, resulting in poor health outcomes for individuals, may impact an already vulnerable group. OBJECTIVE Existing research examines the spread of misinformation. Simil...

Background: Transient migrants, such as international students, have received limited support from host-country governments throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. An increase in misinformation, resulting in poor health outcomes for individuals, may impact an already vulnerable group. Objective: Existing research examines the spread of misinformation....

The ubiquitous search box promised to democratize knowledge access by making information universally accessible. But while many search engines cater well for certain user groups, information tasks and content types, they cater poorly for others. Poorly‐served users include those with certain types of impairment (e.g. dyslexia), and weakly‐supported...

Digital libraries have matured rapidly in recent years: practical large-scale libraries are now ubiquitous, and many fundamental problems are resolved. This paper addresses the future of one area of DL theory and practice, identifying common requirements and needs that are found in contemporary DLs. This shows that a new wave of research and engine...

Humanities scholars face many problems when trying to design, build, present, and maintain digital humanities projects. To mitigate these problems and to improve the user experience of digital humanities collections, it is essential to understand the problems in detail. However, we currently have a fragmented and incomplete picture of what these pr...

Users often seek reading recommendations for what to read, across a variety of topics of interest and genres. While there has been extensive research on the development of recommender algorithms, our understanding of social factors relating to reading recommendation in the digital era is poor. We have no holistic view of how readers interact with d...

BACKGROUND COVID-19 is spreading across the world and people are encouraged to maintain social distance. Technology is helping people and professionals to reschedule their agenda moving from “face-to-face” interactions to remote videoconferencing. Psychologists seek to both keep treating their current patients, and welcome new ones, given the curre...

Background During the COVID-19 pandemic, people have been encouraged to maintain social distance. Technology helps people schedule meetings as remote videoconferencing sessions rather than face-to-face interactions. Psychologists are in high demand because of an increase in stress as a result of COVID-19, and videoconferencing provides an opportuni...

While there has been increasing interest in how creative professionals find information to drive creative outputs, previous information behavior research has largely ignored how arts and crafts hobbyists look for information sources in their everyday lives. To fill this literature gap, we conducted interviews and observations with arts and crafts h...

The panel will explore the challenges and opportunities for bridging the library and information science (LIS) research practice gap in Australia. The panel brings together participants from the Research Assistance and Development for Australian Researchers (RADAR) Grant, an initiative of the Library and Information Science Research Australia (LISR...

Serendipity is a key aspect of user experience, particularly in the context of information acquisition - where it is known as information encountering. Unexpectedly encountering interesting or useful information can spark new insights while surprising and delighting. However, digital environments have been designed primarily for goal-directed seeki...

Libraries increasingly offer much of their collection online, rendering it invisible or unavailable to readers who, for reasons of information experience, prefer to browse the shelves. Although the evidence that shelf browsing is an important part of information behavior is increasing, information browsing as a behavior is somewhat of a black box (...

Many authors have proposed guidelines for online browsing systems, however recently empirical research has added depth to these requirements. There has also been a spate of development in online browsing systems, particularly for library shelf browsing. These strands of research are clearly in service of providing better browsing options in an incr...

Mispractice by researchers—plagiarism in particular—is, according to the research evidence enculturated within research groups. We interview a small sample of senior academics with a clean record regarding plagiarism, to investigate what has influenced their practice, and how they in turn influence the research groups and research students that the...

Search is near-ubiquitous in human society, being used for entertainment, health, financial and business information seeking. Traditional methods of search evaluation have assumed that searchers move forward through search results in a linear manner; early eye tracking studies have suggested the same. Recent research, though, including eye-tracking...

The dominance of desktop computers for much of the past 30 years has meant the study of physical workspaces focused on the ergonomics of the machine and its surrounds, rather than design. The recent explosion of laptop, tablet and powerful mobile computing means that workspaces have new flexibility and constraints. We return to the early study of p...

Nearly 37 million people live with HIV globally and recent advances in medicine have transformed HIV to a chronic disease, if managed. Previous research in Personal Health Informatics has investigated how people self-manage other chronic conditions, such as diabetes, by tracking and reflecting on their health information but there is little knowled...

Presented at HCI Doctoral Consortium 2016

With the increase in electronic publications, and indeed the availability of existing publications in digital form, as well as the encouragement of open access publication, comes a challenge. That challenge is to create assistive software to aid in the discovery and selection of relevant documents to one's information need. Visual interfaces have b...

What does it mean for a reader to borrow an ebook? Ebook technology means that borrowing can take different forms, for example printing and reading. We do not know, though, which of these options readers actually use. Ebook technology generates logs that allow us to understand ebook borrowing patterns over time, both by individual readers and in ag...

Full text available at: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-45521 Tools for automatic subject assignment help deal with scale and sustainability in creating and enriching metadata, establishing more connections across and between resources and enhancing consistency. While some software vendors and experimental researchers claim the to...

The sense of smell has been recognized as an important factor governing our emotions and memory. Nevertheless, it remains the most underexplored sense and is still a relatively new modality in the domain of Human–Computer Interaction. In this article, we report on initial findings from our ongoing research to find support for the significance of sm...

Browsing is a part of book seeking that is important to readers, poorly understood, and ill supported in digital libraries. In earlier work, we attempted to understand the impact of browsing on book borrowing by examining whether books near other loaned books were more likely to be loaned themselves, a phenomenon we termed the neighbour effect. In...

This work describes the development and implementation of a controlled study into the way users form and utilise resilience strategies to overcome threats to performance. Despite a carefully considered design, participants demonstrated creative and unanticipated strategies to overcome deliberately ‘designed-in’ challenges in our task, thus circumve...

The world is faced with a growing number of people who live with chronic medical conditions. There have been numerous digital interventions into personal management of these diseases in recent years, yet gaps remain in the HCI literature. In particular, we lack a systematic understanding of user requirements in tools that support independent manage...

The challenges and complexities that arise as a consequence of taking HCI mobile are widely recognized. However one topic that has seen less investigation is the resultant resilience strategies that users develop and deploy to mitigate threats or challenges, and achieve improved performance or efficiency. In this work, we discuss how the study of m...

Digital reading is a topic of rising interest in digital libraries, particularly in terms of optimizing the reading experience. However, there is relatively little data on the patterns of digital reading, including issues of where and what users read, and how they organize, plan and conduct their reading sessions. This paper reports the first data...

This paper describes a longitudinal ethnographic analysis of space usage in an academic library. We focus on group work, identifying a range of group types and activities. We address how the library space and users' technology choices impact the flow of information within groups, and finally identify some implications for both space and technology...

This chapter reviews the history of reading to demonstrate how changes in technology have influenced how people read, and show that how reading material is produced is a really interesting story. This history forms the backdrop for everything in the present book.

This chapter reviews a range of research that illuminates what is actually happening when someone reads. Reading is a skill that takes decades to master, and is strongly influenced by the context in which it occurs. While, like riding a bicycle, reading is a skill we can take for granted once mastered, in fact the picture underneath is highly compl...

One of the major problems users experience searching for information in libraries is the number of places they have to search. It has long been posited that a single search box (like Google) that searched a range of library resources would solve these problems and make users more effective information seekers in libraries. In this paper we use log...

Download Free Sample 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. To...

Information retrieval work has mostly focused on the automatic process of filtering and retrieving documents based on a query search. The subsequesnt manual process by which the information seeker will scrutinise and triage through the retrieved documents is not thoroughly understood. Limited work, particularly for human factors in web searching ha...

In this paper we present the first version of AugDesk, an affordable augmented reality prototype desk for sorting documents based on their relevance to an information need. The set-up is based on the findings from previous work in conjunction with a user-centred iterative design process to improve both the software and hardware configuration. In th...

In this paper we introduce TicQR -- a photo-based checkbox-enabled interface which bridges the physical and digital document domains, allowing automatic download or processing of useful data from paper documents. There is a long demonstrated need for people to be able to connect between printed material and digital information and services. By usin...

We discuss here our observations of the interaction of bookshop customers with the books and with each other. Contrary to our initial expectations, customers do not necessarily engage in focused, joint information search, as observed in libraries, but rather the bookshop is treated as a social space similar to a cafe. Our results extend the known r...

Digital library research has demonstrated the impact of content presentation on both search and reading behaviours. In this paper, we scrutinise the influence of ebook presentation on user behaviour, focussing on document thumbnails and the first page view. We demonstrate that flaws in presentation increase the volume of short time-span reading, an...

Mobile reading is becoming evermore popular with the introduction of eInk devices such as the Kindle, as well as the many reading applications available on slate PCs and cellular handsets. The portable nature and large storage capacity of these modern mobile devices is making reading a more technology orientated activity. One aspect of mobile readi...

People who suffer from Diabetes are required to make frequent decisions on their personal treatment based on results from glucose monitors. Yet the results returned from the devices form only a part of the decision-making process. We seek to understand the role that glucose monitors have in patient's management practices and how technology could su...

Attentive reading is a complex and cognitively demanding task that uses note-taking and annotation to support the reader’s interpretation of the document. When reading on paper, extensive use of highlighting and other activities are conducted to support attentive reading, but this rich behaviour is not used with digital documents. Many users theref...

A key aspect of searching is the ability of users to absorb information from documents read in order to resolve their task. One group of users who have problems with reading are dyslexic users, who due to underlying cognitive impairments in phonological processing and working memory, tend to read more slowly and make reading errors. The purpose of...

Collaborative reading, or co-reading as we call it, is ubiquitous; it occurs, for instance, in classrooms, book-clubs, and in less coordinated ways through mass media. While individual digital reading has been the subject of much investigation, research into co-reading is scarce. We report a two-phase field study of group reading to identify an ini...

This paper discusses the challenge of providing effective interaction for navigating a user's browsing history in context-aware mobile services. Mobile systems are often composed of a number of services, and navigation must be understood both in terms of a single service and of movement between different services over time. The semantics of simple...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, TPDL 2012 - the successor of the ECDL (European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries) - held in Paphos, Cyprus, in September 2012. The 23 full papers, 19 short papers, 15 posters and 8 de...

When reading on paper, readers often write notes, fold corners or insert bookmarks without apparent conscious effort. Research into digital reading has discovered that electronic tools are far less intuitive, require significantly more attention, and are much less used. This paper introduces "The Digital Reading Desk" - a document reading interface...

Transaction log analyses are common practice to understand user behavior in both online databases and library catalogues. While there has been significant work done in each of these domains, there is little work comparing user queries between library catalogues and online resources. In this paper we report on an exploratory comparison between searc...

The use of light, portable devices such as iPads whose reading angle is readily changed is radically different to reading on a desktop or laptop. However, it would be naive to view this as mere evolution. Rather, such devices permit reading activity to more closely mirror paper. A light, keyboardless device can be used in many different locations a...

Users' search tactics often appear naïve. Much research has endeavored to understand the rudimentary query typically seen in log analyses and user studies. Researchers have tested a number of approaches to supporting query development, including information literacy training and interaction design these have tried and often failed to induce users t...

Reading is increasingly being performed interactively on-screen; for instance, new novels are now routinely released in electronic format for viewing on PCs and mobile devices. Unfortunately, on-screen reading loses many of the natural features of conventional physical media, such as the ability to annotate, slip in bookmarks, turn page corners, an...

This paper presents a real-time collaborative interface for reading groups. We exploit the light and portable properties of iPad hardware to facilitate an intimate interaction experience that gives users the ability to simultaneously mark up their own copy of a document, while instantly viewing notes made by other members of the group. We also intr...

As interactive digital documents are becoming more and more commonplace, we find ourselves searching for new ways to make good use of them. The fast delivery and large storage capacity that digital devices offer, make reading from bulky physical books seem obsolete, even nonsensical. EReaders, the latest craze in digital reading, follows from the i...

Documents of all forms have always been at the centre of research in the humanities and arts. As more literature becomes available electronically, the impact of the digital medium on reading and research also grows. This article provides a review of key research on the limitations of digital reading, spanning a twenty-year period. Most of this lite...

In this paper, we report the design of an RFID sensing infrastructure for digital libraries. In addition to the architecture of the system, we report its deployment in three different applications to illustrate its use and integration with not only the core DL software, but also web browsers and software for reading documents (e.g. in PDF format)....

Collection selection is traditionally a sub-problem of meta-search, and identifies collections most likely to contain relevant documents. However, we propose to treat collection selection as an independent search task with the goal of identifying collections that are relevant as a whole; so the user may return to them to serve future (related) info...

Document triage is defined as the rapid process by which information seekers make relevance decisions on a set of documents [1]. With the rising popularity of small screen readers such as Amazon's Kindle and the ubiquity of smartphones capable of displaying documents, we are faced with the challenge of facilitating information seekers with effectiv...

Traditional digital document navigation found in Acrobat and HTML document readers performs poorly when compared to paper documents for this task. We investigate and compare two methods for improving navigation when a reader first views a digital document. One technique modifies the traditional scrolling method, combining it with Speed-Dependent Au...

This paper reports an investigation into the connection of the workspace of physical libraries with digital library services. Using simple sensor technology, we provide focused access to digital resources on the basis of the user's physical context, including the topic of the stacks they are next to, and the content of books on their reading desks....

This article reports on a longitudinal study of information seeking by undergraduate information management students. It describes how they found and used information, and explores their motivation and decision making. We employed a use-in-context approach where students were observed conducting, and were interviewed about, information-seeking task...

In the four years since the first CAMS workshop, context awareness has become an increasingly commonplace tool for mobile developers. The limited screen displays of many mobile devices mean that content must be carefully selected to match the user's needs and expectations, and context provides one powerful means of performing such tailoring. Furthe...

Document navigation has become increasingly commonplace as the use of electronic documents has grown. Speed–Dependent Automatic Zooming (SDAZ) is one popular method for providing rapid movement within a digital text. However, there is evidence that details of the document are overlooked as the pace of navigation rises. We produced a document reader...

Annotation plays a major role in a user’s reading of a document: from elementary school students making notes on text books to professors marking up their latest research papers. A common place for annotations to appear is in the margin of a document. Surprisingly, there is little systematic knowledge of how, why and when annotations are written in...

Indexes are a well established method of locating information in printed literature just as find is a popular technique when searching in digital documents. However, document reader software has seldom adopted the concept of an index in a systematic manner. This paper describes an implemented system that not only facilitates user created digital in...

Document triage is the moment in the information seeking process when the user first decides the relevance of a document to their information need [17]. This paper reports a study of user behaviour during document triage. The study reveals two main findings: first, that there is a small set of common navigational patterns; second, that certain docu...

Advanced tourist information systems should offer more than relatively static information about sights and places. Instead, semantically rich information about sights should be delivered to the mobile users. Furthermore, tourists should not be overwhelmed by a stream of superfluous data that are unrelated to their interest, location, and knowledge...

To address these and related issues, this JCDL workshop brought together scholars and practitioners from a range of digital library perspectives, with an interest in user-centered evaluation approaches. Invited participants were asked to present and discuss issues associated with the lightweight user-centered evaluation knowledge for digital librar...

We previously investigated the support of alerting services across networks of heterogeneous digital libraries. We now report the first generation of semantically enhanced digital library alerting systems. Where previous alerting services have provided users with notifications of new library content using traditional metadata, we demonstrate the ad...

In this paper, we undertake a study of inexperienced information seeking scholars, identifying areas for improvement in their electronic information seeking and document triage process[3]. We propose a software aid, currently under development.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss the importance of documentation for digital humanities resources. This includes technical documentation of textual markup or database construction, and procedural documentation about resource construction. Design/methodology/approach A case study is presented of an attempt to reuse electronic text to...

When users seek for information, they repeatedly make relevance judgements on individual documents: the act of document triage. Recent research demonstrates that document triage decisions are prone to significant error rates. Document triage also affects the future course of information seeking: users form beliefs about the availability of informat...

Placeholders in physical documents provide critical support for the human reader in relocating material and their place in the text. However, the equivalent tools in digital documents have long been identified as suffering from unintuitive interactions and low rates of use. This paper evaluates the current bookmarking technologies found in digital...