Rick Kopak

• PhD
• Associate Professor - Teaching at University of British Columbia

Cambridge Core - Knowledge Management, Databases and Data Mining - Innovations in Information Retrieval - edited by Allen Foster

Many digital information environments enable sharing of readers' highlights and other annotations, despite the lack of clear evidence of the effects on interaction behaviours and outcomes. We report on an experimental user study (n=15) of the impact of pre-existing highlights of varying quality on the digital reading process and outcomes of partici...

Video‐based learning is increasingly common in higher education; however, the video players available make limited use of logged interaction data to support and guide students' viewing. In this work in progress, we explore the feasibility of aggregating students' annotations of videos (e.g., highlights, notes, and tags) to identify “hot spots,” whi...

Information quality (IQ) is a multidimensional construct, and includes dimensions such as accuracy, completeness, objectivity, and representation that are difficult to measure. Recently, research has shown that ratings of IQ by independent assessors yielded high inter-rater agreement for some information quality dimensions as opposed to others. The...

A largely unquestioned assumption in social reading is that publicly shared annotations improve reading outcomes. In this study, we explore the specific assumption that relevant and irrelevant passive highlighting affects comprehension. Participants were divided by cognitive style based on their degree of Field Dependence-Independence [20]. We foun...

User engagement is recognized as an important component of the user experience, but relatively little is known about the effect of engagement on the learning outcomes of such interactions. This experimental user study examines the relationship between user engagement (UE) and comprehension in varied academic reading environments. Forty-one universi...

This paper reports on a study of digital reading that investigates the effects of different textual environments on information interaction and comprehension outcomes. While there is a large body of literature that compares print and digital reading, research that compares differently designed digital reading environments is limited. Such work can...

This research addresses the need for faceted search systems that can support task-based searching. We report on a systems review carried out to identify the most prevalent facets in current use across three domains and an online questionnaire with 83 responses conducted to assess the perceived usefulness of search facets for different types of sear...

This paper presents three prototypes for bibliographic displays developed as part of an ongoing research project at the Faculty of Information Studies of the University of Toronto. The development of these prototypes builds upon results obtained in earlier phases of the project that addressed issues of both the content and form of bibliographic dis...

Few empirically based standards exist for Web document design. This study collected data on twelve participants who were asked to browse a selected set of Web sites. Participants were also asked to complete a number of tasks. The data were applied to four hypotheses and a research question that were concerned with the use of graphic elements, depth...

As the online scholarly landscape changes, so too must the tools used to traverse it. The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) Reading Tools provides readers a bridge from online scholarly content to a host of contextual information, to a number of discipline-specific search engines and databases, and to other tools. A lot has changed since it was origin...

Scholars are reading more journal articles than ever, so it is important that they focus on the relevant text within the articles they read. To support this goal, this study explores enhancements to a journal reading system by applying the idea of the functional unit, the smallest information unit with a distinct function within four major componen...

The notion of information quality (IQ) has been investigated extensively in recent years. Much of this research has been aimed at conceptualizing IQ and its underlying dimensions (e.g., accuracy, completeness) and at developing instruments for measuring these quality dimensions. However, less attention has been given to the measurability of IQ. The...

Innovations in Information Retrieval - edited by Allen Foster December 2013

This edited collection of essays is a reprise of a 1993 work by John Buschman. The goal of the earlier work was "to look soberly and critically at the phenomenon of information technology in our profession and in our institutions" from a critical perspective based on a number of extant, analytical approaches. This general theme continues in the cur...

Today's readers of scholarly literature want to read more in less time. With this in mind, this study applies the idea of the functional unit to the use of digital documents. A functional unit is the smallest information unit with a distinct function within the Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion components of scholarly journal articles....

In this paper we outline an approach to improving information interaction in exploratory search based on the concept of semantic navigation. We introduce the concept of semantic navigation, discuss some approaches to providing support for semantic navigation at the interface level, and introduce the example of reading tools that have been developed...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of a set of reader‐oriented tools developed as part of an open source journal production and access system. Design/methodology/approach The paper outlines key elements of the reading tools component of Open Journal Systems (OJS). A design rationale is provided, and related to the key elem...

This study reports on user based research on the annotating and linking prototype components of the Open Journal Systems of the Public Knowledge Project. The study describes the features of the components and provides results based on an analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data. The paper concludes by stating design implications of the re...

An underlying challenge of hypertext systems is that of maintaining coherence in meaning when traversing nodes. Functional link typing is one method that has been proposed to address this challenge with the consequent action of increasing global coherence within the hypertext and facilitating increased comprehension. As such, functional link types...

Using a 48-person group in a within-subjects design, we investigated how people search differently within diverse domains: consumer health, shopping, travel and general research. Our goal was to identify the distinctive characteristics of search behavior within each domain that impact the design of the search interface.

Discussion of relevance has permeated the information science literature for the past 50+ years, and yet we are no closer to resolution of the matter. In this research we developed a set of measures to operationalize the dimensions underpinning Saracevic’s manifestations of relevance. We used an existing data set collected from 48 participants who...

Discussion of relevance has permeated the information science literature for the past 50+ years, and yet we are no closer to resolution of the matter. In this research we developed a set of measures to operationalize the dimensions underpinning Saracevic's manifestations of relevance. We used an existing data set collected from 48 participants who...

The objective of our work is to assess how search interfaces can be personalized according to domain-specific needs. In this study we investigated how people search within diverse domains (consumer health, shopping, travel and general research) to identify differences in searching needs. A mixed method research design was used to observe forty-eigh...

The results from a series of three experiments that used Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) data and TREC search topics are compared. These experiments each involved three novel user interfaces (one per experiment). User interfaces that made it easier for users to view text were found to improve recall in all three experiments. A distinction was foun...

a Person to whom all correspondence should be sent: toms@fis.utoronto.ca This paper reports the findings of an exploratory study carried out as part of the Interactive Track at the 10 th annual Text Retrieval Conference (TREC). Forty-eight, non-expert participants each completed four Web search tasks from among four specified topic areas: shopping,...

Though a fundamental component of hypertext, little research has been aimed at developing the link's ability to express specific qualities of the relationship that it establishes between nodes of information. A proposal is made for the development of a taxonomy of link types that describe the function (discursive quality) that characterize the form...

This paper presents an evaluation of three Web based prototypes for bibliographic displays developed as part of an ongoing research project at the Faculty of Information Studies of the University of Toronto. The development of these prototypes builds upon results obtained in earlier phases of the project that addressed issues of both the content an...