ReMarkable TextsReMarkable Texts

Loring HoldenBrown University

April 20, 2004

Goals (1/2)Goals (1/2)

•Provide student app for ConferenceXP to complement Presenter

•Create research platform for note taking–hard to extend existing note taking

applications–our attempted remedy

BSD Open Source licensePlug-in architecture

Goals (2/2)Goals (2/2)

•Forge novel application• Aggregate functionality previously available only in

separate apps• Formative evaluation in an academic (and possibly

DoD training) setting

SummarySummary

•What is different?– Gestural UI– Collaboration– Archiving and history

playback– Interoperates w/ rest of

Conference XP– BSD open source license

Collaboration ImplementationCollaboration Implementation

•N-way synchronous document & annotation sharing

•Scalability

• Uses ConferenceXP for multicast

• Classroom variant has only one sender, so better scalability

•Symmetric: Any participant can exit and rejoin easily

•Collaboration metadata incorporated into document

Collaboration metadata providesCollaboration metadata provides

•Control over your own notes– Privacy– ACL's (who can modify?)

•Mining– Author ID integrated into the system

•Filter by user– Querying, for example:

What user wrote a particular stroke? (querying stroke for user info) Which strokes were written by a particular user? (filtering by user) When did who write what? (filtering by time)

Collaborative note taking – future Collaborative note taking – future workwork

• Easier collaboration startup• Easily fall back to

asynch. collaboration when user not available

• Figure out how each person’s doc looked at a specific time (people may have added ink at the same time, but the other person’s ink didn’t get imported until later)– Also show other docs open at the same time

Sponsors and AvailabilitySponsors and Availability

•Co-funded by:– Microsoft Research, Microsoft TabletPC– NSF National Science Digital Library program– DoD Joint Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Lab

•Publicly available:– http://ReMarkableTexts.org