Mark S. Ackerman
Has also published under the name of:
"Mark Steven Ackerman"
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Publications by Mark S. Ackerman (bibliography)
» 2009 «
Nam, Kevin Kyung, Ackerman, Mark S. and Adamic, Lada A. (2009): Questions in, knowledge in?: a study of Naver's question answering community. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2009. pp. 779-788. Available online
“Large general-purposed community question-answering sites are becoming popular as a new venue for generating knowledge and helping users in their information needs. In this paper we analyze the characteristics of knowledge generation and user participation behavior in the largest question-answering online community in South Korea, Naver Knowledge-iN. We collected and analyzed over 2.6 million question/answer pairs from fifteen categories between 2002 and 2007, and have interviewed twenty six users to gain insights into their motivations, roles, usage and expertise. We find altruism, learning, and competency are frequent motivations for top answerers to participate, but that participation is often highly intermittent. Using a simple measure of user performance, we find that higher levels of participation correlate with better performance. We also observe that users are motivated in part through a point system to build a comprehensive knowledge database. These and other insights have significant implications for future knowledge generating online communities.”
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Zhou, Xiaomu, Ackerman, Mark S. and Zheng, Kai (2009): I just don't know why it's gone: maintaining informal information use in inpatient care. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2009. pp. 2061-2070. Available online
“We conducted a field-based study examining informal nursing information. We examined the use of this information before and after the adoption of a CPOE (Computerized Provider Order Entry) system in an inpatient unit of a large teaching hospital. Before CPOE adoption, nurses used paper working documents to detail psycho-social information about patients; after the CPOE adoption, they did not use paper or digital notes as was planned. The paper describes this process and analyses how several interlocked reasons contributed to the loss of this information in written form. We found that a change in physical location, sufficient convenience, visibility of the information, and permanency of information account for some, but not all, of the outcome. As well, we found that computerization of the nursing data led to a shift in the politics of the information itself -- the nurses no longer had a cohesive agreement about the kinds of data to enter into the system. The findings address the requirements of healthcare computerization to support both formal and informal work practices, respecting the nature of nursing work and the politics of information inherent in complex medical work.”
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Huh, Jina and Ackerman, Mark S. (2009): Designing for all users: including the odd users. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2009. pp. 2449-2458. Available online
“The field of HCI has played an important role in broadening the spectrum of users of computational artifacts. However, users with extreme preferences are mostly ignored by the designers and researchers because they do not constitute a large portion of the market and the users lack generalizable characteristics. In order to further discuss these concerns, this paper introduces a case about the extreme users and the challenges they face. The paper ends with discussing future directions and challenges in designing for all users in the field of HCI.”
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Lee, David, Munson, Sean A., Congleton, Ben, Newman, Mark W., Ackerman, Mark S., Hofer, Erik C. and Finholt, Thomas A. (2009): Montage: a platform for physically navigating multiple pages of web content. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2009. pp. 4477-4482. Available online
“Montage is a platform for rendering multiple pages of web content on large tiled displays (several desktop LCDs arranged in a spatially contiguous matrix). We discuss the advantages of data visualization using a newsstand metaphor, showing many content items at once and allowing users to quickly refine visual searches by walking (physically navigating) closer to specific data on the display. We have used Montage to build three applications that demonstrate the variety of applications that are possible on this platform. These applications have benefits for both everyday use and as research tools.”
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Cook, Eric, Teasley, Stephanie D. and Ackerman, Mark S. (2009): Contribution, commercialization & audience: understanding participation in an online creative community. In: GROUP09 - International Conference on Supporting Group Work 2009. pp. 41-50. Available online
“This paper presents a qualitative study of attitudes towards participation and contribution in an online creative community. The setting of the work is an online community of practice focused on the use and development of a user-customizable music software package called Reaktor. Findings from the study highlight four emergent topics in the discourse related to user contributions to the community: contribution assessment, support for learning, perceptions of audience and tensions about commercialization. Our analysis of these topics frames discussion about the value and challenges of attending to amateur and professional users in online creative communities.”
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» 2008 «
Adamic, Lada A., Zhang, Jun, Bakshy, Eytan and Ackerman, Mark S. (2008): Knowledge sharing and yahoo answers: everyone knows something. In: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on the World Wide Web 2008. pp. 665-674. Available online
“Yahoo Answers (YA) is a large and diverse question-answer forum, acting not only as a medium for sharing technical knowledge, but as a place where one can seek advice, gather opinions, and satisfy one's curiosity about a countless number of things. In this paper, we seek to understand YA's knowledge sharing and activity. We analyze the forum categories and cluster them according to content characteristics and patterns of interaction among the users. While interactions in some categories resemble expertise sharing forums, others incorporate discussion, everyday advice, and support. With such a diversity of categories in which one can participate, we find that some users focus narrowly on specific topics, while others participate across categories. This not only allows us to map related categories, but to characterize the entropy of the users' interests. We find that lower entropy correlates with receiving higher answer ratings, but only for categories where factual expertise is primarily sought after. We combine both user attributes and answer characteristics to predict, within a given category, whether a particular answer will be chosen as the best answer by the asker.”
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Congleton, Ben, Ackerman, Mark S. and Newman, Mark W. (2008): The ProD framework for proactive displays. In: Cousins, Steve B. and Beaudouin-Lafon, Michel (eds.) Proceedings of the 21st Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology October 19-22, 2008, Monterey, CA, USA. pp. 221-230. Available online
» 2007 «
Zhang, Jun, Ackerman, Mark S. and Adamic, Lada (2007): Expertise networks in online communities: structure and algorithms. In: Proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on the World Wide Web 2007. pp. 221-230. Available online
“Web-based communities have become important places for people to seek and share expertise. We find that networks in these communities typically differ in their topology from other online networks such as the World Wide Web. Systems targeted to augment web-based communities by automatically identifying users with expertise, for example, need to adapt to the underlying interaction dynamics. In this study, we analyze the Java Forum, a large online help-seeking community, using social network analysis methods. We test a set of network-based ranking algorithms, including PageRank and HITS, on this large size social network in order to identify users with high expertise. We then use simulations to identify a small number of simple simulation rules governing the question-answer dynamic in the network. These simple rules not only replicate the structural characteristics and algorithm performance on the empirically observed Java Forum, but also allow us to evaluate how other algorithms may perform in communities with different characteristics. We believe this approach will be fruitful for practical algorithm design and implementation for online expertise-sharing communities.”
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Nam, Kevin K. and Ackerman, Mark S. (2007): Arkose: reusing informal information from online discussions. In: GROUP07: International Conference on Supporting Group Work 2007. pp. 137-146. Available online
“Online discussions such as a large-scale community brainstorming often end up with an unorganized bramble of ideas and topics that are difficult to reuse. A process of distillation is needed to boil down a large information space into information that is concise and organized. We take a system-augmented approach to the problem by creating a set of tools with which human editors can collaboratively distill a large amount of informal information. Two design principles, which we will define as incremental diagenesis and incremental summarization, help editors flexibly distill the informal information. Our system, Arkose, is built as a demonstration of these principles, providing the necessary tools for distillation. These tools include a number of visualization and information retrieval mechanisms, as well as an authoring tool and a navigator for the information space. They support a gradual increase in the order and reusability of the information space and allow various levels of intermediate states of a distillation.”
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Elliott, Margaret, Ackerman, Mark S. and Scacchi, Walt (2007): Knowledge work artifacts: kernel cousins for free/open source software development. In: GROUP07: International Conference on Supporting Group Work 2007. pp. 177-186. Available online
“Most empirical studies of peer production have focused on the final products of these efforts (such as software in Free/Open Source projects), but there are also many other knowledge artifacts that improve the effectiveness of the project. This paper presents a study of an intermediate work product, or informalism, used in a Free/Open Source Software project, GNUe. A digest-like artifact called the Kernel Cousin (KC) was used extensively in the project. These KCs allowed critical coordination and memory, but at the cost of considerable effort. The paper presents two examples of the KCs' use in the project as well as an analysis of their benefits and costs.”
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Zhang, Jun, Ackerman, Mark S., Adamic, Lada and Nam, Kevin Kyung (2007): QuME: a mechanism to support expertise finding in online help-seeking communities. In: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology October 7-10, 2007, Newport, Rhode Island, USA. pp. 111-114. Available online
“Help-seeking communities have been playing an increasingly critical role in the way people seek and share information. However, traditional help-seeking mechanisms of these online communities have some limitations. In this paper, we describe an expertise-finding mechanism that attempts to alleviate the limitations caused by not knowing users' expertise levels. As a result of using social network data from the online community, this mechanism can automatically infer expertise level. This allows, for example, a question list to be personalized to the user's expertise level as well as to keyword similarity. We believe this expertise location mechanism will facilitate the development of next generation help-seeking communities.”
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Zhang, Jun, Ye, Yang, Ackerman, Mark S. and Qu, Yan (2007): SISN: A Toolkit for Augmenting Expertise Sharing Via Social Networks. In: Schuler, Douglas (ed.) OCSC 2007 - Online Communities and Social Computing - Second International Conference July 22-27, 2007, Beijing, China. pp. 491-500. Available online
» 2005 «
Zhang, Jun and Ackerman, Mark S. (2005): Searching for expertise in social networks: a simulation of potential strategies. In: GROUP05: International Conference on Supporting Group Work November 6-9, 2005, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA. pp. 71-80. Available online
“People search for people with suitable expertise all of the time in their social networks - to answer questions or provide help. Recently, efforts have been made to augment this searching. However, relatively little is known about the social characteristics of various algorithms that might be useful. In this paper, we examine three families of searching strategies that we believe may be useful in expertise location. We do so through a simulation, based on the Enron email data set. (We would be unable to suitably experiment in a real organization, thus our need for a simulation.) Our emphasis is not on graph theoretical concerns, but on the social characteristics involved. The goal is to understand the tradeoffs involved in the design of social network based searching engines.”
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Resnick, Paul, Riedl, John, Terveen, Loren and Ackerman, Mark S. (2005): Beyond threaded conversation. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2005 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2005. pp. 2138-2139. Available online
» 2004 «
Teevan, Jaime, Alvarado, Christine, Ackerman, Mark S. and Karger, David R. (2004): The perfect search engine is not enough: a study of orienteering behavior in directed search. In: Dykstra-Erickson, Elizabeth and Tscheligi, Manfred (eds.) Proceedings of ACM CHI 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria. pp. 415-422. Available online
“This paper presents a modified diary study that investigated how people performed personally motivated searches in their email, in their files, and on the Web. Although earlier studies of directed search focused on keyword search, most of the search behavior we observed did not involve keyword search. Instead of jumping directly to their information target using keywords, our participants navigated to their target with small, local steps using their contextual knowledge as a guide, even when they knew exactly what they were looking for in advance. This stepping behavior was especially common for participants with unstructured information organization. The observed advantages of searching by taking small steps include that it allowed users to specify less of their information need and provided a context in which to understand their results. We discuss the implications of such advantages for the design of personal information management tools.”
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Halverson, Christine, Erickson, Thomas D. and Ackerman, Mark S. (2004): Behind the help desk: evolution of a knowledge management system in a large organization. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW04 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2004. pp. 304-313. Available online
“This paper examines the way in which a knowledge management system (KMS)-by which we mean the people, processes and software-came into being and evolved in response to a variety of shifting social, technical and organizational pressures. We draw upon data from a two year ethnographic study of a sophisticated help desk to trace the KMS from its initial conception as a "Common Problems" database for help desk personnel, to its current instantiation as a set of Frequently Asked Questions published on an intranet for help desk clients. We note how shifts in management, organizational structure, incentives, software technologies, and other factors affected the development of the system. This study sheds light on some of the difficulties that accompany the implementation of CSCW systems, and provides an analysis of how such systems are often designed by bricolage.”
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Ackerman, Mark S., Huysman, Marlene, Carroll, John M., Wellman, Barry, DeMichelis, Giorgio and Wulf, Volker (2004): Communities and technologies: an approach to foster social capital?. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW04 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2004. pp. 406-408. Available online
“Communities are social entities whose actors share common needs, interests, or practices: they constitute the basic units of social experience. With regard to communities, social capital captures the structural, relational and cognitive aspects of the relationships among their members. Social capital is defined as a set of properties of a social entity (e.g. norms, level of trust, and intensive social networking) which enables joint activities and cooperation for mutual benefit. It can be understood as the glue which holds communities together. On this panel we will discuss whether and how information technology can strengthen communities by fostering social capital.”
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Ackerman, Mark S. and Halverson, Christine (2004): Organizational Memory as Objects, Processes, and Trajectories: An Examination of Organizational Memory in Use. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 13 (2) pp. 155-189
“For proper knowledge management, organizations must consider how knowledge is kept and reused. The term organizational memory is due for an overhaul. Memory appears to be everywhere in organizations; yet, the term has been limited to only a few uses. Based on an ethnographic study of a telephone hotline group, this paper presents a micro-level, distributed cognition analysis of two hotline calls, the work activity surrounding the calls, and the memory used in the work activity. Drawing on the work of Star, Hutchins, and Strauss, the paper focuses on issues of applying past information for current use. Our work extends Strauss' and Hutchins' trajectories to get at the understanding of potential future use by participants and its role in current information storage. We also note the simultaneously shared provenance and governance of multiple memories - human and technical. This analysis and the theoretical framework we construct should be to be useful in further efforts in describing and analyzing organizational memory within the context of knowledge management efforts.”
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Ackerman, Mark S. (2004): Privacy in pervasive environments: next generation labeling protocols. In Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 8 (6) pp. 430-439
Schmandt, Chris and Ackerman, Mark S. (2004): Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. In Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 8 (6) pp. 389-390
» 2003 «
Ackerman, Mark S., Pipek, Volkmar and Wulf, Volker (2003): Sharing Expertise : Beyond Knowledge Management. MIT Press
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“The field of knowledge management focuses on how organizations can most effectively store, manage, retrieve, and enlarge their intellectual properties. The repository view of knowledge management emphasizes the gathering, providing, and filtering of explicit knowledge. The information in a repository has the advantage of being easily transferable and reusable. But it is not easy to use decontextualized information, and users often need access to human experts. This book describes a more recent approach to knowledge management, which the authors call "expertise sharing." Expertise sharing emphasizes the human aspects--cognitive, social, cultural, and organizational--of knowledge management, in addition to information storage and retrieval. Rather than focusing on the management level of an organization, expertise sharing focuses on the self-organized activities of the organization's members. The book addresses the concerns of both researchers and practitioners, describing current literature and research as well as offering information on implementing systems. It consists of three parts: an introduction to knowledge sharing in large organizations; empirical studies of expertise sharing in different types of settings; and detailed descriptions of computer systems that can route queries, assemble people and work, and augment naturally occurring social networks within organizations.”
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Halverson, Christine and Ackerman, Mark S. (2003): "Yeah, the Rush ain't here yet - Take a break": Creation and Use of an Artifact as Organizational Memory. In: HICSS 2003 2003. p. 113. Available online
» 2002 «
Schmandt, Chris, Kim, Jang, Lee, Kwan, Vallejo, Gerardo and Ackerman, Mark S. (2002): Mediated voice communication via mobile IP. In: Beaudouin-Lafon, Michel (ed.) Proceedings of the 15th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology October 27-30, 2002, Paris, France. pp. 141-150. Available online
“Impromptu is a mobile audio device which uses wireless Internet Protocol
(IP) to access novel computer-mediated voice communication channels. These
channels show the richness of IP-based communication as compared to
conventional mobile telephony, adding audio processing and storage in the
network, and flexible, user-centered call control protocols. These channels may
be synchronous, asynchronous, or event-triggered, or even change modes as a
function of other user activity. The demands of these modes plus the need to
navigate with an entirely non-visual user interface are met with a number of
audio-oriented user interaction techniques.”
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Lutters, Wayne G. and Ackerman, Mark S. (2002): Achieving safety: a field study of boundary objects in aircraft technical support. In: Churchill, Elizabeth F., McCarthy, Joe, Neuwirth, Christine and Rodden, Tom (eds.) Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work November 16 - 20, 2002, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. pp. 266-275. Available online
“Boundary objects are a critical, but understudied, theoretical construct in
CSCW. Through a field study of aircraft technical support, we examined the role
of boundary objects in the "achievement of safety" by service engineers. The
resolution process of repair requests was captured in two compound boundary
objects. These crystallizations did not manifest a static interpretation, but
instead were continually re-interpreted in light of meta-negotiations. This
suggests design implications for organizational memory systems which can more
fluidly represent the meta-negotiations surrounding boundary objects.”
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» 2001 «
Ackerman, Mark S., Darrell, Trevor and Weitzner, Daniel J. (2001): Privacy in Context. In Human-Computer Interaction, 16 (2) pp. 167-176
“Context-aware computing offers the promise of significant user gains-the ability for systems to adapt more readily to user needs, models, and goals. Dey, Abowd, and Salber (2001 [this special issue]) present a masterful step toward understanding context-aware applications. We examine Dey et al. in the light of privacy issues-that is, individuals' control over their personal data-to highlight some of the thorny issues in context-aware computing that will be upon us soon. We argue that privacy in context-aware computing, especially those with perceptually aware environments, will be quite complex. Indeed, privacy forms a co-design space between the social, the technical, and the regulatory. We recognize that Dey et al. is a necessary first step in examining important software engineering concerns, but future research will need to consider how regulatory and technical solutions might be co-designed to form a public good.”
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» 2000 «
Ackerman, Mark S. and Edwards, Keith (eds.) Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 2000, San Diego, California, United States.
McDonald, David W. and Ackerman, Mark S. (2000): Expertise Recommender: A Flexible Recommendation System and Architecture. In: Kellogg, Wendy A. and Whittaker, Steve (eds.) Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work 2000, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. pp. 231-240. Available online
“Locating the expertise necessary to solve difficult problems is a nuanced social and collaborative problem. In organizations, some people assist others in locating expertise by making referrals. People who make referrals fill key organizational roles that have been identified by CSCW and affiliated research. Expertise locating systems are not designed to replace people who fill these key organizational roles. Instead, expertise locating systems attempt to decrease workload and support people who have no other options. Recommendation systems are collaborative software that can be applied to expertise locating. This work describes a general recommendation architecture that is grounded in a field study of expertise locating. Our expertise recommendation system details the work necessary to fit expertise recommendation to a work setting. The architecture and implementation begin to tease apart the technical aspects of providing good recommendations from social and collaborative concerns.”
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Ackerman, Mark S. (2000): The Intellectual Challenge of CSCW: The Gap Between Social Requirements and Technical Feasibility. In Human-Computer Interaction, 15 (2) pp. 181-203
“Over the last 10 years, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has identified a base set of findings. These findings are taken almost as assumptions within the field. In summary, they argue that human activity is highly flexible, nuanced, and contextualized and that computational entities such as information sharing, roles, and social norms need to be similarly flexible, nuanced, and contextualized. However, current systems cannot fully support the social world uncovered by these findings. In this article I argue that there is an inherent gap between the social requirements of CSCW and its technical mechanisms. The social-technical gap is the divide between what we know we must support socially and what we can support technically. Exploring, understanding, and hopefully ameliorating this social-technical gap is the central challenge for CSCW as a field and one of the central problems for human-computer interaction. Indeed, merely attesting the continued centrality of this gap could be one of the important intellectual contributions of CSCW. I also argue that the challenge of the social-technical gap creates an opportunity to refocus CSCW.”
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Ackerman, Mark S. and Hadverson, Christine A. (2000): Reexamining Organizational Memory. In Communications of the ACM, 43 (1) pp. 58-64
» 1999 «
Ackerman, Mark S. and Mandel, Eric (1999): Memory in the Small: Combining Collective Memory and Task Support for a Scientific Community. In Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, 9 (2) pp. 105-127
“Many forms of memory exist embedded within the processes and tasks of an organization or community. Memory in the small, or memory utilized in the performance of an institutionally important task, serves as an effective task support mechanism. By basing memory on tasks (and basing task support on memory), memory systems can provide additional and necessary support services for organizations and communities. As an example of memory in the small, in this article we describe a software system, called the ASSIST, that combines memory with task performance for a scientific community. The ASSIST utilizes and stores the collective memory of astrophysicists about data analysis, and is used worldwide by astrophysicists. In this article, we also consider the architectural and theoretical issues involved when combining memory with task performance.”
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Ackerman, Mark S. and Halverson, Christine (1999): Organizational Memory: Processes, Boundary Objects, and Trajectories. In: HICSS 1999 1999. . Available online
» 1998 «
Ackerman, Mark S. and Halverson, Christine (1998): Considering an Organization's Memory. In: Poltrock, Steven and Grudin, Jonathan (eds.) Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work November 14 - 18, 1998, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 39-48. Available online
“The term organizational memory is due for an overhaul. Memory appears to be everywhere in organizations; yet, the term has been limited to a few uses. In this paper we examine what memory in an organization really is. Based on an ethnographic study of a telephone hotline group, this paper presents a micro-level analysis of a hotline call, the work activity surrounding the call, and the memory used in the work activity. We do this analysis from the viewpoint of distributed cognition theory, finding it fruitful for an understanding of an organization's memory.”
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McDonald, David W. and Ackerman, Mark S. (1998): Just Talk to Me: A Field Study of Expertise Location. In: Poltrock, Steven and Grudin, Jonathan (eds.) Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work November 14 - 18, 1998, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 315-324. Available online
“Everyday, people in organizations must solve their problems to get their work accomplished. To do so, they often must find others with knowledge and information. Systems that assist users with finding such expertise are increasingly interesting to organizations and scientific communities. But, as we begin to design and construct such systems, it is important to determine what we are attempting to augment. Accordingly, we conducted a five month field study of a medium-sized software firm. We found the participants use complex, iterative behaviors to minimize the number of possible expertise sources, while at the same time, provide a high possibility of garnering the necessary expertise. We briefly consider the design implications of the mechanisms identification, selection, and escalation behaviors found during our field study.”
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Muramatsu, Jack and Ackerman, Mark S. (1998): Computing, Social Activity, and Entertainment: A Field Study of a Game MUD. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 7 (1) pp. 87-122
“Are game and entertainment systems different than work-oriented systems? What drives the user's experience in a collaborative game? To answer these questions, we performed a participant-observation study of a combat MUD, a game similar to Dungeons and Dragons. Our interest is in how this social world is arranged and managed (rather than, for example, in how participants form or display individual identities). The study explores the social arrangements and activities that give meaning and structure to the participants. We found that conflict and cooperation were the dominant social activities on this MUD, much more so than sociability. The game's management played a critical function in maintaining and promoting these activities. Moreover, novelty and entertainment were important for the design of both the system features and the sociality itself.”
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Ackerman, Mark S. (1998): Augmenting Organizational Memory: A Field Study of Answer Garden. In ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 16 (3) pp. 203-224
“A growing concern for organizations and groups has been to augment their knowledge and expertise. One such augmentation is to provide an organizational memory, some record of the organization's knowledge. However, relatively little is known about how computer systems might enhance organizational, group, or community memory. This article presents Answer Garden, a system for growing organizational memory. The article describes the system and its underlying implementation. It then presents findings from a field study of Answer Garden. The article discusses the usage data and qualitative evaluations from the field study, and then draws a set of lessons for next-generation organizational memory systems.”
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» 1997 «
Ackerman, Mark S., Hindus, Debby, Mainwaring, Scott D. and Starr, Brian (1997): Hanging on the 'Wire: A Field Study of an Audio-Only Media Space. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 4 (1) pp. 39-66
“The primary focus of this article is an analysis of an audio-only media space from a computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) perspective. To explore whether audio by itself is suitable for shared media systems, we studied a workgroup using an audio-only media space. This media space, called Thunderwire, combined high-quality audio with open connections to create a shared space for its users. The two-month field study provided a richly nuanced understanding of this audio space's social use. The system afforded rich sociable interactions. As well, users were able to create a useful, usable social space; however, through an analysis of the social norms that the participants formulated, we show that they had to take into account being in an audio-only environment. Within the field study, then, audio by itself was sufficient for a usable media space and a useful social space, but users were forced to adapt to many audio-only and system conditions. The article also considers audio's implications for privacy.”
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» 1996 «
Olson, Gary M., Olson, Judith S. and Ackerman, Mark S. (eds.) Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work November 16 - 20, 1996, Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
Ackerman, Mark S. and Palen, Leysia (1996): The Zephyr Help Instance: Promoting Ongoing Activity in a CSCW System. In: Tauber, Michael J., Bellotti, Victoria, Jeffries, Robin, Mackinlay, Jock D. and Nielsen, Jakob (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 96 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 14-18, 1996, Vancouver, Canada. pp. 268-275. Available online
“If Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) systems are to be successful over time, it will be necessary to promote ongoing and continuing activity, not just initial adoption. In this paper, we consider what technical and social affordances are required to encourage the continued use of a CSCW system. To explore these issues, we examine a chat-like system, the Zephyr Help Instance, which is used extensively at MIT. The Help Instance facilitates users asking questions of one another, and is an example of a distributed help and problem-solving system. We provide an overview of the system's use as well as those mechanisms, both technical and social, that facilitate continuing its use over time.”
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Ackerman, Mark S. and McDonald, David W. (1996): Answer Garden 2: Merging Organizational Memory with Collaborative Help. In: Olson, Gary M., Olson, Judith S. and Ackerman, Mark S. (eds.) Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work November 16 - 20, 1996, Boston, Massachusetts, United States. pp. 97-105. Available online
“This research examines a collaborative solution to a common problem, that of providing help to distributed users. The Answer Garden 2 system provides a second-generation architecture for organizational and community memory applications. After describing the need for Answer Garden 2's functionality, we describe the architecture of the system and two underlying systems, the Cafe ConstructionKit and Collaborative Refinery. We also present detailed descriptions of the collaborative help and collaborative refining facilities in the Answer Garden 2 system.”
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Hindus, Debby, Ackerman, Mark S., Mainwaring, Scott D. and Starr, Brian (1996): Thunderwire: A Field Study of an Audio-Only Media Space. In: Olson, Gary M., Olson, Judith S. and Ackerman, Mark S. (eds.) Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work November 16 - 20, 1996, Boston, Massachusetts, United States. pp. 238-247. Available online
“To explore the potential of using audio by itself in a shared media system, we studied a workgroup using an audio-only media space. This media space, called Thunderwire, combined high-quality audio with open connections to create a shared space for its users. The two-month field study provided a richly nuanced understanding of this audio space's social use. The system afforded rich sociable interactions. Indeed, within the field study, audio by itself afforded a telepresent environment for its users. However while a usable media space and a useful social space, Thunderwire required its users to adapt to many audio-only conditions.”
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Ackerman, Mark S. and Starr, Brian (1996): Social Acitivity Indicators for Groupware. In IEEE Computer, 29 (6) pp. 37-42
» 1995 «
Ackerman, Mark S. and Starr, Brian (1995): Social Activity Indicators: Interface Components for CSCW Systems. In: Robertson, George G. (ed.) Proceedings of the 8th annual ACM symposium on User interface and software technology November 15 - 17, 1995, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. pp. 159-168. Available online
“Knowing what social activity is occurring within and through a Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) system is often very useful. This is especially true for computer-mediated communication systems such as chat and other synchronous applications. People will attend to these systems more closely when they know that there is interesting activity on them. Interface mechanisms for indicating social activity, however, are often ad-hoc, if present at all. This paper argues for the importance of displaying social activity as well as proposes a generalized mechanism for doing so. This social activity indication mechanism is built upon a new CSCW toolkit, the Cafe ConstructionKit, and the Cafe ConstructionKit provides a number of important facilities for making construction of these indicators easy and straight-forward. Accordingly, this paper presents both the Cafe ConstructionKit as a CSCW toolkit as well as a mechanism for creating activity indicators.”
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Covi, Lisa and Ackerman, Mark S. (1995): Such Easy-to-Use Systems!: How Organizations Shape the Design and Use of Online Help Systems. In: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Organizational Computing Systems 1995 August 13-16, 1995, Milpitas, California, USA. pp. 280-288.
Ackerman, Mark S. and Mandel, Eric (1995): Memory in the small: an application to provide task-based organizational memory for a scientific community. In: HICSS 1995 1995. pp. 323-332. Available online
» 1994 «
Ackerman, Mark S. (1994): Augmenting the Organizational Memory: A Field Study of Answer Garden. In: Smith, John B., Smith, F. Don and Malone, Thomas W. (eds.) Proceedings of the 1994 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work October 22 - 26, 1994, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States. pp. 243-252. Available online
“A growing concern for organizations and groups has been to augment their knowledge and expertise. One such augmentation is to provide an organizational memory, some record of the organization's knowledge. However, relatively little is known about how computer systems might enhance organizational, group, or community memory. This paper presents findings from a field study of one such organizational memory system, the Answer Garden. The paper discusses the usage data and qualitative evaluations from the field study, and then draws a set of lessons for next-generation organizational memory systems.”
Copyrights may apply
Ackerman, Mark S. (1994): Definitional and Contextual Issues in Organizational and Group Memories. In: HICSS 1994 1994. pp. 191-200.
» 1991 «
Ackerman, Mark S. (1991): Shared Expertise and the Answer Garden. In: Robertson, Scott P., Olson, Gary M. and Olson, Judith S. (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 91 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 28 - June 5, 1991, New Orleans, Louisiana. p. 489. Available online
» 1990 «
Schmandt, Chris, Hindus, Debby, Ackerman, Mark S. and Manandhar, Sanjay (1990): Observations on Using Speech Input for Window Navigation. In: Diaper, Dan, Gilmore, David J., Cockton, Gilbert and Shackel, Brian (eds.) INTERACT 90 - 3rd IFIP International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction August 27-31, 1990, Cambridge, UK. pp. 787-793.
“We discuss the suitability of speech recognition for navigating within a window system and we describe Xspeak, an implementation of voice control for the X Window System. We made this interface available to a number of student programmers, and compared the use of speech and a pointer for window navigation through empirical and observational means. Our experience indicates that speech was attractive for some users, and we comment on their activities and recognition accuracy. These observations reveal pitfalls and advantages of using speech input in windows systems.”
Copyrights may apply
Ackerman, Mark S. and Malone, Thomas W. (1990): Answer Garden: A Tool for Growing Organizational Memory. In: Lochovsky, Frederick H. and Allen, Robert (eds.) Proceedings of the Conference on Office Information Systems 1990 April 25-27, 1990, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. pp. 31-39.
“Answer Garden allows organizations to develop databases of commonly asked questions that grow "organically" as new questions arise and are answered. It is designed to help in situations (such as field service organizations and customer "hot lines") where there is a continuing stream of questions, many of which occur over and over, but some of which the organization has never seen before. The system includes a branching network of diagnostic questions that helps users find the answers they want. If the answer is not present, the system automatically sends the question to the appropriate expert, and the answer is returned to the user as well as inserted into branching network. Experts can also modify this network in response to users' problems. Our initial Answer Garden database contains questions and answers about how to use the X Window System.”
Copyrights may apply
Schmandt, Chris, Ackerman, Mark S. and Hindus, Debby (1990): Augmenting a Window System with Speech Input. In IEEE Computer, 23 (8) pp. 50-56
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Mar 16th, 2010
Changes to this page (author)
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