Robert E. Kraut
Has also published under the name of:
"Robert Kraut" and "R. E. Kraut"
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Publications by Robert E. Kraut (bibliography)
» 2009 «
Kittur, Aniket, Lee, Bryant and Kraut, Robert E. (2009): Coordination in collective intelligence: the role of team structure and task interdependence. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2009. pp. 1495-1504. Available online
“The success of Wikipedia has demonstrated the power of peer production in knowledge building. However, unlike many other examples of collective intelligence, tasks in Wikipedia can be deeply interdependent and may incur high coordination costs among editors. Increasing the number of editors increases the resources available to the system, but it also raises the costs of coordination. This suggests that the dependencies of tasks in Wikipedia may determine whether they benefit from increasing the number of editors involved. Specifically, we hypothesize that adding editors may benefit low-coordination tasks but have negative consequences for tasks requiring a high degree of coordination. Furthermore, concentrating the work to reduce coordination dependencies should enable more efficient work by many editors. Analyses of both article ratings and article review comments provide support for both hypotheses. These results suggest ways to better harness the efforts of many editors in social collaborative systems involving high coordination tasks.”
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Lee, Min Kyung, Dillahunt, Tawanna, Pendleton, Bryan, Kraut, Robert E. and Kiesler, Sara (2009): Tailoring websites to increase contributions to online communities. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2009. pp. 4003-4008. Available online
“Many online communities experience insufficient contributions from their members. In order to encourage contributions to the community, we examined a website tailoring approach to fit a community's website interface with the motivations of the community. In particular, we used the characteristics of other websites as a method of gauging user motivation. We built two different websites with financial and altruistic themes, and conducted an online experiment with 122 users to test the impact of both segmenting and tailoring on contributions to a recycling community. Preliminary results show that both tailoring and segmenting techniques were effective with altruistic users.”
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Sutcliffe, Alistair, Gonzalez, Victor M. and Kraut, Robert E. (2009): Social mediating technologies: developing the research agenda. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2009. pp. 4775-4778. Available online
“Social Mediating Technologies (SMTs) range from e-mail to social networking sites and community websites. The popularity of these technologies is increasing rapidly, yet we have little understanding about how and why people find these technologies so appealing. The research challenge is to try to understand the causal drivers for usage of social technologies, and theory-based understanding of how the affordances of such technologies meet with people's cognitive and social needs. This workshop will provide a forum for researchers to synthesise current knowledge on SMTs and map out future research directions.”
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» 2008 «
Hsieh, Gary, Lai, Jennifer, Hudson, Scott E. and Kraut, Robert E. (2008): Using tags to assist near-synchronous communication. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 223-226. Available online
“In this work, we introduce the use of tags to support the near synchronous use of instant messaging. As a proof-of-concept, we developed a plug-in in Lotus Sametime, an enterprise IM client. Our plug-in supports tasks that do not need immediate attention and tasks that have deadlines. A trial deployment and survey shows that users can see the potential usefulness of such a tagging system in their IM communication. Furthermore, users rated our design intuitive and easy to use. Longer study is needed to explore communication norms that results from its use.”
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Shklovski, Irina, Kraut, Robert E. and Cummings, Jonathon (2008): Keeping in touch by technology: maintaining friendships after a residential move. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 807-816. Available online
“Many observers have praised new communication technologies for providing convenient and affordable tools for maintaining relationships at a distance. Yet the precise role of mediated communication in relationship maintenance has been difficult to isolate. In this paper, we treat residential moves as natural experiments that threaten existing social relationships and often force people to rely on mediated communication to maintain their old relationships. Results from a 3-wave survey of 900 residential movers describing 1892 relationships shows that email and the telephone play different roles in social relationships. Email helps maintain social relationships, in the sense that relationships decline when email drops after the move. However increases in email are not associated with increases in the depth of the relationship or exchanges of support. In contrast, phone calls help movers grow relationships and exchange social support.”
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Burke, Moira and Kraut, Robert E. (2008): Mind your P's and Q's: when politeness helps and hurts in online communities. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 3195-3200. Available online
“Little is known about the impact of politeness in online communities. This project combines deductive and inductive approaches to automatically model linguistic politeness in online discussion groups and determine the impact of politeness on desired outcomes, such as getting people to reply to one another. We find that politeness triples reply rates in some technical groups, but rudeness is more effective in others. The model can be applied as a "politeness checker" to encourage people to write in ways likely to garner a response from specific communities.”
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Burke, Moira and Kraut, Robert E. (2008): Taking up the mop: identifying future Wikipedia administrators. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 3441-3446. Available online
“As Wikipedia grows, so do the messy byproducts of collaboration. Backlogs of administrative work are increasing, suggesting the need for more users with privileged admin status. This paper presents a model of editors who have successfully passed the peer review process to become admins. The lightweight model is based on behavioral metadata and comments, and does not require any page text. It demonstrates that the Wikipedia community has shifted in the last two years to prioritizing policymaking and organization experience over simple article-level coordination, and mere edit count does not lead to adminship. The model can be applied as an "AdminFinderBot" to automatically search all editors' histories and pick out likely future admins, as a self-evaluation tool, or as a dashboard of relevant statistics for voters evaluating admin candidates.”
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Burke, Moira and Kraut, Robert E. (2008): Mopping up: modeling wikipedia promotion decisions. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW08 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2008. pp. 27-36. Available online
“This paper presents a model of the behavior of candidates for promotion to administrator status in Wikipedia. It uses a policy capture framework to highlight similarities and differences in the community's stated criteria for promotion decisions to those criteria actually correlated with promotion success. As promotions are determined by the consensus of dozens of voters with conflicting opinions and unwritten expectations, the results highlight the degree to which consensus is truly reached. The model is fast and easily computable on the fly, and thus could be applied as a self-evaluation tool for editors considering becoming administrators, as a dashboard for voters to view a nominee's relevant statistics, or as a tool to automatically search for likely future administrators. Implications for distributed consensus-building in online communities are discussed.”
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Kittur, Aniket and Kraut, Robert E. (2008): Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in wikipedia: quality through coordination. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW08 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2008. pp. 37-46. Available online
“Wikipedia's success is often attributed to the large numbers of contributors who improve the accuracy, completeness and clarity of articles while reducing bias. However, because of the coordination needed to write an article collaboratively, adding contributors is costly. We examined how the number of editors in Wikipedia and the coordination methods they use affect article quality. We distinguish between explicit coordination, in which editors plan the article through communication, and implicit coordination, in which a subset of editors structure the work by doing the majority of it. Adding more editors to an article improved article quality only when they used appropriate coordination techniques and was harmful when they did not. Implicit coordination through concentrating the work was more helpful when many editors contributed, but explicit coordination through communication was not. Both types of coordination improved quality more when an article was in a formative stage. These results demonstrate the critical importance of coordination in effectively harnessing the "wisdom of the crowd" in online production environments.”
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Burke, Moira and Kraut, Robert E. (2008): Mind your Ps and Qs: the impact of politeness and rudeness in online communities. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW08 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2008. pp. 281-284. Available online
“Little is known about the impact of politeness in online communities. We use an inductive approach to automatically model linguistic politeness in online discussion groups and determine the impact of politeness on desired outcomes, such as increased reply rates. We describe differences in perceived politeness across a variety of groups and find that, controlling for group norms of responsiveness and message length, politeness increases reply rates in some technical groups, but rudeness is more effective in some political groups. The perceived politeness scores will be used to validate linguistic politeness strategies from theory and to inform the creation of a machine learning model of linguistic politeness that can be applied as a "politeness checker" to educate newcomers to write in ways likely to elicit response from specific communities or as a rudeness detection tool for moderators.”
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Hsieh, Gary, Kraut, Robert E., Hudson, Scott E. and Weber, Roberto (2008): Can markets help?: applying market mechanisms to improve synchronous communication. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW08 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2008. pp. 535-544. Available online
“There is a growing interest in applying market mechanisms to tackle everyday communication problems such as communication interruptions and communication overload. Prior analytic proofs have shown that a signaling and screening mechanism can make senders and recipients of messages better off. However, these proofs make certain assumptions that do not hold in real world environments. For example, these prior works assume that there are no transaction costs in a communication market and that monetary incentives are the only motivators in communication between strangers. This research builds upon prior analytic work and empirically tests the validity of the claim that signaling and screening mechanisms will improve communication welfare. Our results show that while these types of markets can indeed improve communication welfare, a simpler, less expressive fixed-price market can lead to higher welfare than a more expressive, variable pricing and screening mechanism. Findings from this study also provide valuable insights for technology designs. For example, these results suggest the need to reduce cognitive overhead in using communication markets.”
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» 2007 «
Seay, A. Fleming and Kraut, Robert E. (2007): Project massive: self-regulation and problematic use of online gaming. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2007 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2007. pp. 829-838. Available online
“A longitudinal design was employed to collect three waves of survey data over a 14 month period from 2790 online gamers. Respondents were asked questions about their gaming activity, motivations, personality, social and emotional environment, and the effect gaming has had on their lives. Prospective analysis was used to establish causal and temporal linkages among the repeatedly measured factors. While the data provide some indication that a player's reasons for playing do influence the development of problematic usage, these effects are overshadowed by the central importance of self-regulation in managing both the timing and amount of play. An individual's level of self-regulatory activity is shown to be very important in allowing them to avoid negative outcomes like problematic use. The role of depression is also discussed. With responsible use, online gaming appears to be a healthy recreational activity that provides millions of people with hours of social entertainment and adaptive diversion. However, failure to manage play behavior can lead to feelings of dependency.”
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Weisz, Justin D., Kiesler, Sara, Zhang, Hui, Ren, Yuqing, Kraut, Robert E. and Konstan, Joseph A. (2007): Watching together: integrating text chat with video. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2007 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2007. pp. 877-886. Available online
“Watching video online is becoming increasingly popular, and new video streaming technologies have the potential to transform video watching from a passive, isolating experience into an active, socially engaging experience. However, the viability of an active social experience is unclear: both chatting and watching video require attention, and may interfere with one another and detract from the experience. In this paper, we empirically examine the activity of chatting while watching video online. We examine how groups of friends and strangers interact, and find that chat has a positive influence on social relationships, and people chat despite being distracted. We discuss the benefits and opportunities provided by mixing chat and video, uncover some of the attentional and social challenges inherent in this combination of media, and provide guidance for structuring the viewing experience.”
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Gergle, Darren, Rosé, Carolyn P. and Kraut, Robert E. (2007): Modeling the impact of shared visual information on collaborative reference. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2007 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2007. pp. 1543-1552. Available online
“A number of recent studies have demonstrated that groups benefit considerably from access to shared visual information. This is due, in part, to the communicative efficiencies provided by the shared visual context. However, a large gap exists between our current theoretical understanding and our existing models. We address this gap by developing a computational model that integrates linguistic cues with visual cues in a way that effectively models reference during tightly-coupled, task-oriented interactions. The results demonstrate that an integrated model significantly outperforms existing language-only and visual-only models. The findings can be used to inform and augment the development of conversational agents, applications that dynamically track discourse and collaborative interactions, and dialogue managers for natural language interfaces.”
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Harper, F. Maxwell, Frankowski, Dan, Drenner, Sara, Ren, Yuqing, Kiesler, Sara, Terveen, Loren, Kraut, Robert E. and Riedl, John (2007): Talk amongst yourselves: inviting users to participate in online conversations. In: Proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces 2007. pp. 62-71. Available online
“Many small online communities would benefit from increased diversity or activity in their membership. Some communities run the risk of dying out due to lack of participation. Others struggle to achieve the critical mass necessary for diverse and engaging conversation. But what tools are available to these communities to increase participation? Our goal in this research was to spark contributions to the movielens.org discussion forum, where only 2% of the members write posts. We developed personalized invitations, messages designed to entice users to visit or contribute to the forum. In two field experiments, we ask (1) if personalized invitations increase activity in a discussion forum, (2) how the choice of algorithm for intelligently choosing content to emphasize in the invitation affects participation, and (3) how the suggestion made to the user affects their willingness to act. We find that invitations lead to increased participation, as measured by levels of reading and posting. More surprisingly, we find that invitations emphasizing the social nature of the discussion forum increase user activity, while invitations emphasizing other details of the discussion are less successful.”
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» 2006 «
Rashid, Al Mamunur, Ling, Kimberly, Tassone, Regina D., Resnick, Paul, Kraut, Robert E. and Riedl, John (2006): Motivating participation by displaying the value of contribution. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2006. pp. 955-958. Available online
“One of the important challenges faced by designers of online communities is eliciting sufficient contributions from community members. Users in online communities may have difficulty either in finding opportunities to add value, or in understanding the value of their contributions to the community. Various social science theories suggest that showing users different perspectives on the value they add to the community will lead to differing amounts of contribution. The present study investigates a design augmentation for an existing community Web site that could benefit from additional contribution. The augmented interface includes individualized opportunities for contribution and an estimate of the value of each contribution to the community. The value is computed in one of four different ways: (1) value to self; (2) value to a small group the user has affinity with; (3) value to a small group the user does not have affinity with; and (4) value to the entire user community. The study compares the effectiveness of the different notions of value to 160 community members.”
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Arguello, Jaime, Butler, Brian S., Joyce, Lisa, Kraut, Robert E., Ling, Kimberly S. and Wang, Xiaoqing (2006): Talk to me: foundations for successful individual-group interactions in online communities. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2006. pp. 959-968. Available online
“People come to online communities seeking information, encouragement, and conversation. When a community responds, participants benefit and become more committed. Yet interactions often fail. In a longitudinal sample of 6,172 messages from 8 Usenet newsgroups, 27% of posts received no response. The information context, posters' prior engagement in the community, and the content of their posts all influenced the likelihood that they received a reply, and, as a result, their willingness to continue active participation. Posters were less likely to get a reply if they were newcomers. Posting ontopic, introducing oneself via autobiographical testimonials, asking questions, using less complex language and other features of the messages, increased replies. Results suggest ways that developers might increase the ability of online communities to support successful individual-group interactions.”
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Shklovski, Irina, Kraut, Robert E. and Cummings, Jonathon (2006): Routine patterns of internet use & psychological well-being: coping with a residential move. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2006. pp. 969-978. Available online
“In this paper we examine how routine uses of the Internet for communication with family and friends and for entertainment may serve as indicators of overall levels of psychological well-being. Changes in psychological well-being in response to a major life event, such as a residential move, can drive changes in routine uses of the Internet, suggesting Internet-based coping strategies. Specifically, women who report high levels of depressive affect, decrease internet use for communication. Men with similar levels of depressive affect increase internet use for entertainment. We discuss implications of these findings for our understanding of the role of the Internet in everyday behavior and instances of coping with stressful situations.”
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Gergle, Darren, Kraut, Robert E. and Fussell, Susan R. (2006): The impact of delayed visual feedback on collaborative performance. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2006. pp. 1303-1312. Available online
“When pairs work together on a physical task, seeing a common workspace benefits their performance and transforms their use of language. Previous results have demonstrated that visual information helps collaborative pairs to understand the current state of their task, ground their conversations, and communicate efficiently. However, collaborative technologies often impinge on the visual information needed to support successful collaboration. One example of this is the introduction of delayed visual feedback in a collaborative environment. We present results from two studies that detail the form of the function that describes the relationship between visual delay and collaborative task performance. The first study precisely demonstrates how a range of visual delays differentially impact performance and the collaborative strategies employed. The second study describes how parameters of the task, such as the dynamics of the visual environment, reduce the amount of delay that can be tolerated.”
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Dabbish, Laura and Kraut, Robert E. (2006): Email overload at work: an analysis of factors associated with email strain. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW06 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2006. pp. 431-440. Available online
“Almost every office worker can relate to feelings of email overload and stress, but in reality the concept of email strain is not well understood. In this paper, we describe a large-scale nationwide organizational survey examining the relationship between email use and feelings of email overload and task coordination. We found that higher email volume was associated with increased feelings of email overload, but this relationship was moderated by certain email management strategies. The contribution to the field of CSCW is a better understanding of the concept of email related stress, and initial scale development for the assessment of email-related overload and perceptions of the work-importance of email.”
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Ankolekar, Anupriya, Sycara, Katia, Herbsleb, James, Kraut, Robert E. and Welty, Chris (2006): Supporting online problem-solving communities with the semantic web. In: Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on the World Wide Web 2006. pp. 575-584. Available online
“The Web plays a critical role in hosting Web communities, their content and interactions. A prime example is the open source software (OSS) community, whose members, including software developers and users, interact almost exclusively over the Web, constantly generating, sharing and refining content in the form of software code through active interaction over the Web on code design and bug resolution processes. The Semantic Web is an envisaged extension of the current Web, in which content is given a well-defined meaning, through the specification of metadata and ontologies, increasing the utility of the content and enabling information from heterogeneous sources to be integrated. We developed a prototype Semantic Web system for OSS communities, Dhruv. Dhruv provides an enhanced semantic interface to bug resolution messages and recommends related software objects and artifacts. Dhruv uses an integrated model of the OpenACS community, the software, and the Web interactions, which is semi-automatically populated from the existing artifacts of the community.”
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» 2005 «
Dabbish, Laura, Kraut, Robert E., Fussell, Susan R. and Kiesler, Sara (2005): Understanding email use: predicting action on a message. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2005 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2005. pp. 691-700. Available online
“Email consumes significant time and attention in the workplace. We conducted an organizational survey to understand how and why people attend to incoming email messages. We examined people's ratings of message importance and the actions they took on specific email messages, based on message characteristics and characteristics of receivers and senders. Respondents kept half of their new messages in the inbox and replied to about a third of them. They rated messages as important if they were about work and required action. Importance, in turn, had a modest impact on whether people replied to their incoming messages and whether they saved them. The results indicate that factors other than message importance (e.g., their social nature) also determine how people handle email. Overall, email usage reflects attentional differences due both to personal propensities and to work demands and relationships.”
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Kraut, Robert E., Sunder, Shyam, Telang, Rahul and Morris, James (2005): Pricing Electronic Mail to Solve the Problem of Spam. In Human-Computer Interaction, 20 (1) pp. 195-223
“Junk e-mail or spam is rapidly choking off e-mail as a reliable and efficient means of communication over the Internet. Although the demand for human attention increases rapidly with the volume of information and communication, the supply of attention hardly changes. Markets are a social institution for efficiently allocating supply and demand of scarce resources. Charging a price for sending messages may help discipline senders from demanding more attention than they are willing to pay for. Price may also credibly inform recipients about the value of a message to the sender before they read it. This article examines economic approaches to the problem of spam and the results of two laboratory experiments to explore the consequences of a pricing system for electronic mail. Charging postage for e-mail causes senders to be more selective and to send fewer messages. However, recipients did not interpret the postage paid by senders as a signal of the importance of the messages. These results suggest that markets for attention have the potential for addressing the problem of spam but their design needs further development and testing.”
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» 2004 «
Gergle, Darren, Millen, David R., Kraut, Robert E. and Fussell, Susan R. (2004): Persistence matters: making the most of chat in tightly-coupled work. 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. 431-438. Available online
“How much history of the dialogue should a chat client include? Some chat clients have minimized the dialogue history to deploy the space for other purposes. A theory of conversational coordination suggests that stripping away history raises the cost of conversational grounding, creating problems for both writers and readers. To test this proposition and inform design, we conducted an experiment in which one person instructed another on how to solve a simple puzzle. Participants had chat clients that showed either a single conversational turn or six of them. Having the dialogue history helped collaborators communicate efficiently and led to faster and better task performance. The dialogue history was most useful when the puzzles were more linguistically complex and when instructors could not see the work area. We present evidence of participants adapting their discourse to partially compensate for deficits in the communication media.”
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Barley, Stephen R., Dutton, William H., Kiesler, Sara, Resnick, Paul, Kraut, Robert E. and Yates, JoAnne (2004): Does CSCW need organization theory?. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW04 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2004. pp. 122-124. Available online
“CSCW as a field has been driven primarily by researchers' desire to solve real world problems of groups and organizations, and to use new technology to solve these problems. The field has accumulated a set of empirically-based interdisciplinary studies and many interesting new applications. The question to be addressed in this panel is whether CSCW as a field is ready for theory--whether theory is needed to move the field along, or on the contrary, whether the problems and the technology are still too new or are changing too fast to accommodate theory. The panelists will describe some of the organization theories that could be applied to CSCW, and debate their usefulness, taking both sides of the question.”
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Dabbish, Laura and Kraut, Robert E. (2004): Controlling interruptions: awareness displays and social motivation for coordination. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW04 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2004. pp. 182-191. Available online
“Spontaneous communication is common in the workplace but can be disruptive. Such communication usually benefits the initiator more than the target of the disruption. Previous research has indicated that awareness displays showing the workload of a target can reduce the harm interruptions inflict, but can increase the cognitive load on interrupters. This paper describes an experiment testing whether team membership influences interrupters' motivation to use awareness displays and whether the informational-intensity of a display influences its utility and cost. Results indicate interrupters use awareness displays to time communication only when they and their partners are rewarded as a team and that this timing improves the target's performance on a continuous attention task. Eye-tracking data shows that monitoring an information-rich display imposes a substantial attentional cost on the interrupters, and that an abstract display provides similar benefit with less distraction.”
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Beenen, Gerard, Ling, Kimberly, Wang, Xiaoqing, Chang, Klarissa, Frankowski, Dan, Resnick, Paul and Kraut, Robert E. (2004): Using social psychology to motivate contributions to online communities. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW04 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2004. pp. 212-221. Available online
“Under-contribution is a problem for many online communities. Social psychology theories of social loafing and goal-setting can provide mid-level design principles to address this problem. We tested the design principles in two field experiments. In one, members of an online movie recommender community were reminded of the uniqueness of their contributions and the benefits that follow from them. In the second, they were given a range of individual or group goals for contribution. As predicted by theory, individuals contributed when they were reminded of their uniqueness and when they were given specific and challenging goals, but other predictions were not borne out. The paper ends with suggestions and challenges for mining social science theories as well as implications for design.”
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Gergle, Darren, Kraut, Robert E. and Fussell, Susan R. (2004): Action as language in a shared visual space. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW04 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2004. pp. 487-496. Available online
“A shared visual workspace allows multiple people to see similar views of objects and environments. Prior empirical literature demonstrates that visual information helps collaborators understand the current state of their task and enables them to communicate and ground their conversations efficiently. We present an empirical study that demonstrates how action replaces explicit verbal instruction in a shared visual workspace. Pairs performed a referential communication task with and without a shared visual space. A detailed sequential analysis of the communicative content reveals that pairs with a shared workspace were less likely to explicitly verify their actions with speech. Rather, they relied on visual information to provide the necessary communicative and coordinative cues.”
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» 2003 «
Kraut, Robert E. (2003): Applying Social Psychological Theory to the Problem of Group Work. In: Carroll, John M. "HCI Models, Theories, and Frameworks". Morgan Kaufman Publishers pp. 325-353
Fussell, Susan R., Setlock, Leslie D. and Kraut, Robert E. (2003): Effects of head-mounted and scene-oriented video systems on remote collaboration on physical tasks. In: Cockton, Gilbert and Korhonen, Panu (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2003 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 5-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA. pp. 513-520.
Kraut, Robert E., Fussell, Susan R. and Siegel, Jane (2003): Visual Information as a Conversational Resource in Collaborative Physical Tasks. In Human-Computer Interaction, 18 (1) pp. 13-49
“In this article we consider the ways in which visual information is used as
a conversational resource in the accomplishment of collaborative physical
tasks. We focus on the role of visual information in maintaining task awareness
and in achieving mutual understanding in conversation. We first describe the
theoretical framework we use to analyze the role of visual information in
physical collaboration. Then, we present two experiments that vary the amount
and quality of the visual information available to participants during a
collaborative bicycle repair task. We examine the effects of this visual
information on performance and on conversational strategies. We conclude with a
general discussion of how situational awareness and conversational grounding
are achieved in collaborative tasks and with some design considerations for
systems to support remote collaborative repair.”
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» 2002 «
Kraut, Robert E., Gergle, Darren and Fussell, Susan R. (2002): The use of visual information in shared visual spaces: informing the development of virtual co-presence. 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. 31-40. Available online
“A shared visual workspace is one where multiple people can see the same
objects at roughly the same time. We present findings from an experiment
investigating the effects of shared visual space on a collaborative puzzle
task. We show that having the shared visual space helps collaborators
understand the current state of their task and enables them to communicate and
ground their conversations efficiently. These processes are associated with
faster and better task performance. Delaying the visual update in the space
reduces benefits and degrades performance. The shared visual space is more
useful when tasks are visually complex or when actors have no simple vocabulary
for describing their world. We find evidence for the ways in which participants
adapt their discourse processes to their level of shared visual information.”
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Kraut, Robert E., Morris, James H., Telang, Rahul, Filer, Darrin, Cronin, Matt and Sunder, Shyam (2002): Markets for attention: will postage for email help?. 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. 206-215. Available online
“Balancing the needs of information distributors and their audiences has
grown harder in the age of the Internet. While the demand for attention
continues to increase rapidly with the volume of information and communication,
the supply of human attention is relatively fixed. Markets are a social
institution for efficiently balancing supply and demand of scarce resources.
Charging a price for sending messages may help discipline senders from
demanding more attention than they are willing to pay for. Price may also help
recipients estimate the value of a message before reading it. We report the
results of two laboratory experiments to explore the consequences of a pricing
system for electronic mail. Charging postage for email causes senders to be
more selective and send fewer messages. However, recipients did not use the
postage paid by senders as a signal of importance. These studies suggest
markets for attention have potential, but their design needs more work.”
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Cummings, Jonathon N. and Kraut, Robert E. (2002): Domesticating Computers and the Internet. In The Information Society, 18 (3)
Cummings, Jonathon N., Butler, Brian S. and Kraut, Robert E. (2002): The quality of online social relationships. In Communications of the ACM, 45 (7) pp. 103-108
» 2001 «
Monk, Andrew and Kraut, Robert E. (2001): Editorial: Home Use of Information and Communications Technology. In International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 54 (5) pp. 663-664
Christ, Mario, Krishnan, Ramayya, Nagin, Daniel, Kraut, Robert E. and Günther, Oliver (2001): Trajectories of Individual WWW Usage: Implications for Electronic Commerce. In: HICSS 2001 2001. . Available online
» 2000 «
Espinosa, Alberto, Cadiz, Jonathan J., Rico-Gutierrez, Luis, Kraut, Robert E., Scherlis, William and Lautenbacher, Glenn (2000): Coming to the Wrong Decision Quickly: Why Awareness Tools Must be Matched with Appropriate Tasks. In: Turner, Thea, Szwillus, Gerd, Czerwinski, Mary, Peterno, Fabio and Pemberton, Steven (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2000 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 1-6, 2000, The Hague, The Netherlands. pp. 392-399. Available online
“This paper presents an awareness tool designed to help distributed, asynchronous groups solve problems quickly. Using a lab study, it was found that groups that used the awareness tool tended to converge and agree upon a solution more quickly. However, it was also found that individuals who did not use the awareness tool got closer to the correct solution. Implications for the design of awareness tools are discussed, with particular attention paid to the importance of matching the features of an awareness tool with a workgroup's tasks and goals.”
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Fussell, Susan R., Kraut, Robert E. and Siegel, Jane (2000): Coordination of Communication: Effects of Shared Visual Context on Collaborative Work. 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. 21-30. Available online
“We outline some of the benefits of shared visual information for collaborative repair tasks and report on a study comparing collaborative performance on a manual task by workers and helpers who are located side-by-side or connected via audio-video or audio-only links. Results show that the dyads complete the task more quickly and accurately when helpers are co-located than when they are connected via an audio link. However, they didn't achieve similar efficiency gains when they communicated through an audio/video link. These results demonstrate the value of a shared visual work space, but raise questions about the adequacy of current video communication technology for implementing it.”
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Kiesler, Sara, Zdaniuk, Bozena, Lundmark, Vicki and Kraut, Robert E. (2000): Troubles With the Internet: The Dynamics of Help at Home. In Human-Computer Interaction, 15 (4) pp. 323-351
“Despite advances in technology, nearly everyone experiences technical challenges using home computers and the Internet. In a field trial of household Internet usage, 89% of 93 families needed support from a computer help desk in the 1st year they used the Internet. However, usually only the most technically involved members of the family requested external technical support, and this behavior was associated with other computer-related behaviors in the household. We explore the process by which a family member with comparatively high technical skill or enthusiasm, often a teenager, becomes the family guru, makes external support requests, and becomes the person in the family to whom others turn for technical help. The family guru benefits from this role, influences the household's adoption of technology, and represents an important link between households and computer support professionals. The role also is a fascinating example of the evolution of intergeneration relationships.”
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Steinfield, Charles W., Chan, Alice P. and Kraut, Robert E. (2000): Computer Mediated Markets: An Introduction and Preliminary Test of Market Structure Impacts. In J. Computer-Mediated Communication, 5 (3)
» 1998 «
Kraut, Robert E., Mukhopadhyay, Tridas, Szczypula, Janusz, Kiesler, Sara and Scherlis, William (1998): Communication and Information: Alternative Uses of the Internet in Households. In: Karat, Clare-Marie, Lund, Arnold, Coutaz, Joëlle and Karat, John (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 98 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 18-23, 1998, Los Angeles, California. pp. 368-375. Available online
“The Internet has been characterized as a superhighway to information and as a high-tech extension of the home telephone. How are people really using the Internet? The history of previous technologies that support interpersonal communication suggests that communication may be a more important use and determinant of participants' commitment to the Internet than is information acquisition and entertainment. Operationalizing interpersonal communication as the use of electronic mail and information acquisition and entertainment as the use of the World Wide Web, we analyzed longitudinal data from a field trial of 229 individuals in 110 households during their first year on the Internet. The results show that interpersonal communication is a stronger driver of Internet use than are information and entertainment applications.”
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Fussell, Susan R., Kraut, Robert E., Lerch, F. Javier, Scherlis, William, McNally, Matthew M. and Cadiz, Jonathan J. (1998): Coordination, Overload and Team Performance: Effects of Team Communication Strategies. 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. 275-284. Available online
“The goal of this paper is to identify the communication tactics that allow management teams to successfully coordinate without becoming overloaded, and to see whether successful coordination and freedom from overload independently influence team performance. We found that how much teams communicated, what they communicated about, and the technologies they used to communicate predicted coordination and overload. Team coordination but not overload predicted team success.”
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Kiesler, Sara, Kraut, Robert E., Donath, Judith S., Wellman, Barry and Rheingold, Howard (1998): An Internet Paradox: A Social Medium That May Undermine Sociability. 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. 403-404. Available online
“Is the current Internet leading people to have strong connections to others or is it working against this? New empirical results suggest that using the Internet leads to less social involvement, more loneliness, less communication within the family, and more depression. The panel will assess whether these results are believable, and if so whether new services on the Internet can be designed to support strong social ties. The second goal of the panel is to outline these good designs.”
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Kraut, Robert E., Steinfield, Charles, Chan, Alice P., Butler, Brian S. and Hoag, Anne (1998): Coordination and Virtualization: The Role of Electronic Networks and Personal Relationships. In J. Computer-Mediated Communication, 3 (4)
Kraut, Robert E., Kiesler, Sara B., Mukhopadhyay, Tridas, Scherlis, William L. and Patterson, Michael (1998): Social Impact of the Internet: What Does It Mean?. In Communications of the ACM, 41 (12) pp. 21-22
» 1997 «
Kiesler, Sara, Kraut, Robert E., Lundmark, Vicki, Scherlis, William and Mukhopadhyay, Tridas (1997): Usability, Help Desk Calls, and Residential Internet Usage. In: Pemberton, Steven (ed.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 97 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference March 22-27, 1997, Atlanta, Georgia. pp. 536-537. Available online
“For the average person, the Internet is still too hard to use. We report evidence from HomeNet, a field trial in Pittsburgh that tries to understand how people use the Internet. Despite our reducing technological and economic barriers to use, families had problems connecting and using the Internet. We show that help calls, however, are not a good indicator of usability, since it is the "enthusiasts" and people with instrumental tasks to accomplish who call.”
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» 1996 «
Kraut, Robert E., Scherlis, William, Mukhopadhyay, Tridas, Manning, Jane and Kiesler, Sara (1996): HomeNet: A Field Trial of Residential Internet Services. 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. 284-291. Available online
“HomeNet is a field trial of residential Internet use with lowered barriers to use. We use multiple longitudinal data collection techniques, including server-side instrumentation. This paper is an initial description of how diverse families used the Internet in the first five months of the trial, and of variables that predicted this usage. The results have implications for design (e.g., provide more help for adults to get started), for marketing (e.g., lower income people have as much desire for on-line services as do upper income people), and for research (e.g., understand why teenagers' lead family computing).”
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Kraut, Robert E., Miller, Mark D. and Siegel, Jane (1996): Collaboration in Performance of Physical Tasks: Effects on Outcomes and Communication. 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. 57-66. Available online
“We report an empirical study of people using mobile collaborative systems to support maintenance tasks on a bicycle. Results show that field workers make repairs more quickly and accurately when they have a remote expert helping them. Some pairs were connected by a shared video system, where the video camera focused on the active workspace and they communicated with full duplex audio. For other pairs, either the video was eliminated or the audio was reduced to half duplex (but not both). Pairs' success at collaboration did not vary with the communication technology. However, the manner in which they coordinated advice-giving did vary with the communication technology. In particular, help was more proactive and coordination was less explicit when the pairs had video connections. The results show the value of collaboration, but raise questions about the interaction of communication media and conversational coordination on task performance.”
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Kraut, Robert E. (1996): The Internet @ Home (Introduction to the Special Section). In Communications of the ACM, 39 (12) pp. 33-35
Kraut, Robert E., Scherlis, William L., Mukhopadhyay, Tridas, Manning, Jane and Kiesler, Sara B. (1996): The HomeNet Field Trial of Residential Internet Services. In Communications of the ACM, 39 (12) pp. 55-63
Streeter, Lynn A., Kraut, Robert E., Jr., Henry C. Lucas and Caby, Laurence (1996): How Open Data Networks Influence Business Performance and Market Structure. In Communications of the ACM, 39 (7) pp. 62-73
» 1995 «
Steinfield, Charles, Kraut, Robert E. and Plummer, Alice (1995): The Impact Of Electronic Commerce On Buyer-Seller Relationships. In J. Computer-Mediated Communication, 1 (3)
Kraut, Robert E. and Streeter, Lynn A. (1995): Coordination in Software Development. In Communications of the ACM, 38 (3) pp. 69-81
» 1994 «
Kraut, Robert E., Cool, C., Rice, Ronald E. and Fish, Robert S. (1994): Life and Death of New Technology: Task, Utility and Social Influences on the Use of a Communication Medium. 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. 13-21. Available online
“This field experiment investigates individual, structural and social influences on the use of two video telephone systems. One system flourished, while an equivalent system died. We use a time series design and multiple data sources to test media richness theory, critical mass theory, and social influence theories about new media use. Results show that the fit between tasks and features of the communications medium influences use to a degree, but cannot explain why only one system survived. Critical mass -- the numbers of people one can reach on a system -- and social influence -- the norms that grow up around a new medium -- can explain this phenomenon.”
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» 1993 «
Fish, Robert S., Kraut, Robert E., Root, Robert W. and Rice, Ronald E. (1993): Video as a Technology for Informal Communication. In Communications of the ACM, 36 (1) pp. 48-61
» 1992 «
Fish, Robert S., Kraut, Robert E., Root, Robert W. and Rice, Ronald E. (1992): Evaluating Video as a Technology for Informal Communication. In: Bauersfeld, Penny, Bennett, John and Lynch, Gene (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 92 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference June 3-7, 1992, Monterey, California. pp. 37-48. Available online
“Collaborations in organizations thrive on communication that is informal because informal communication is frequent, interactive, and expressive. Informal communication is crucial for the coordination of work, learning an organization's culture, the perpetuation of the social relations that underlie collaboration, and, in general, any situation that requires communication to resolve ambiguity. Informal communication is traditionally mediated by physical proximity, but physical proximity cannot mediate in geographically distributed organizations. The research described here evaluates the adequacy of a version of a desktop video/audio conferencing system for supporting informal communication in a research and development laboratory. The evaluation took place during a trial in which the system was used by summer employees and their supervisor-mentors. While the system was used frequently, the most common uses and users' assessments suggest that it was used more like a telephone or electronic mail than like physically mediated face-to-face communication. However, some features of its use transcended traditional media and allowed users to gain awareness of their work environment. The paper concludes with a discussion of requirements for successful technology to support informal communication.”
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Cool, C., Fish, Robert S., Kraut, Robert E. and Lowery, C. M. (1992): Iterative Design of Video Communication Systems. In: Mantel, Marilyn and Baecker, Ronald M. (eds.) Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work November 01 - 04, 1992, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. pp. 25-32. Available online
“This paper reviews the design and implementation of several video telephony systems at Bellcore as a case study in iterative design. In contrast to single user computer applications, communication systems consists of both the interconnection technology and the people who are interconnected. From a user's point of view, the capabilities provided by the system, the rules for its use, and its reaction to their actions depend jointly on what its developers implemented and how other users behave. This fact has wide-ranging implications for system design, use, and evaluation. In reviewing our design experience, we identify four dilemmas for iterative design that flow from the inherently social nature of communication systems. We conclude with methodological and theoretical suggestions to supplement conventional iterative design principles as applied to communications systems.”
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Galegher, Jolene and Kraut, Robert E. (1992): Computer-Mediated Communication and Collaborative Writing: Media Influence and Adaptation to Communication Constraints. In: Mantel, Marilyn and Baecker, Ronald M. (eds.) Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work November 01 - 04, 1992, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. pp. 155-162. Available online
“According to contingency theory, tasks involving high levels of uncertainty and equivocality require a communication medium that permits interactive, expressive communication. The theory of adaptive structuration, however, takes a more dynamic view of the relationship between communication technology and communication behavior, recognizing the malleability of human behavior as well as the adaptability of technology. According to the structuration perspective, individuals can adapt their behavior to achieve their goals despite obstacles in the technological environment. To assess the relative validity of these formulations, we examined media choices and responses to communication constraints in a collaborative writing task. The results of this experiment indicate that contingency theory has some general validity in that the task/technology matches it defines do, indeed, occur spontaneously and do contribute to ease and efficiency in task performance. However, the results also draw attention to the human potential for behavioral adaptation, and imply a need for further research designed to identify likely patterns of adaptation in particular technological environments.”
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Olson, Gary M., Olson, Judith S. and Kraut, Robert E. (1992): Introduction to This Special Issue on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. In Human-Computer Interaction, 7 (3) pp. 251-256
Kraut, Robert E., Galegher, Jolene, Fish, Robert S. and Chalfonte, Barbara L. (1992): Task Requirements and Media Choice in Collaborative Writing. In Human-Computer Interaction, 7 (4) pp. 375-407
“Modalities such as face-to-face meetings permit rich communication, which involves both expressiveness and interactivity. Modalities such as text annotation or electronic mail, however, limit both. Contingency theory, as applied to collaborative writing, says that as the equivocality of the writing task increases, communication modalities that support rich communication are more likely to be used. In addition, it says that if these modalities are used, equivocal tasks can be carried out with greater ease and better results. This article explores these hypotheses using multiple data sources: an interview study tracing the history of 55 published collaborative articles, two field experiments comparing the use of face-to-face communication and electronic mail as media for collaborative writing, and a laboratory experiment comparing voice and text as media for annotating documents. Taken together, the findings of these investigations are loosely consistent with a contingency theory of media use, but they suggest that careful measures of task characteristics are needed to obtain a detailed understanding of the effects of particular task/technology combinations. Further, they indicate that it may be important to consider the distinction between the interactivity and expressiveness components of media richness in making decisions about what technologies to buy or build.”
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» 1991 «
Chalfonte, Barbara L., Fish, Robert S. and Kraut, Robert E. (1991): Expressive Richness: A Comparison of Speech and Text as Media for Revision. 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. pp. 21-26. Available online
“Both theory and data suggest that richer, more informal, and more interactive media should be better suited for handling the more complex, equivocal, and emotional aspects of collaborative tasks. To test this hypothesis, we constructed an experiment in which participants were required to make either written or spoken annotations to a document to help a fictional co-author revise it. We seeded relatively error-free texts with errors of different scope. The results provide strong evidence that a richer -- in the sense of a more expressive -- medium is especially valuable for the more complex, controversial, and social aspects of a collaborative task. Subjects stated that they preferred to use voice to comment on higher-level issues in a document and to use text to deal with lower-level problems of spelling and grammar. When subjects' annotation modalities were restricted, using written annotations led them to comment on more local problems in the text, while using speech led them to comment on higher level concerns. When they did use written annotations to comment on global problems, they were less successful than when they used spoken annotations. Finally, when they offered spoken annotations, they were more likely to add features, such as personal pronouns and explanation, that made their comments more equivocal and socially communicative. These results indicate the uses to which systems that provide voice annotation are likely to be put.”
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» 1990 «
Fish, Robert S., Kraut, Robert E. and Chalfonte, Barbara L. (1990): The VideoWindow System in Informal Communications. In: Halasz, Frank (ed.) Proceedings of the 1990 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work October 07 - 10, 1990, Los Angeles, California, United States. pp. 1-11.
Galegher, Jolene and Kraut, Robert E. (1990): Computer-Mediated Communication for Intellectual Teamwork: A Field Experiment in Group Writing. In: Halasz, Frank (ed.) Proceedings of the 1990 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work October 07 - 10, 1990, Los Angeles, California, United States. pp. 65-78.
Landauer, Thomas K. and Kraut, Robert E. (1990): CHI in the Applied Research Divisions at Bellcore. In: Carrasco, Jane and Whiteside, John (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 90 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference 1990, Seattle, Washington,USA. pp. 285-286.
“Bellcore has several active research programs relevant to human-computer interaction. This talk describes research conducted in the Cognitive Science and Interpersonal Communications Research Groups. We describe their research on information retrieval and on collaboration and pay particular attention to the styles of research employed in these groups and to the way in which behavioral investigations have guided technical invention.”
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Kraut, Robert E. and Streeter, Lynn A. (1990): Satisfying the Need to Know: Interpersonal Information Access. 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. 909-915.
“We examine the ability of traditional and computer-based communication technologies to spread organizational and task knowledge in large scale software development environments. It is our contention that the principal problems in software development are social and organizational, rather than cognitive. We review: (1) factors that make improving software development formidable, and (2) technological aids and project management methods that have been tried as possible "solutions," (3) a survey we are conducting on coordination techniques in large projects and conclude by (4) discussing candidate information/communication technologies to support coordination.”
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Kraut, Robert E. and Dumais, Susan (1990): Computerization and the Quality of Working Life: The Role of Control. 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. 56-68.
“Does the degree of control people have over their work environments moderate the impact of computerization in organizations? This paper addresses this question with a quantitative case study and a national survey. Results of the case study show that clerical workers with more control over the day-to-day aspects of their jobs had better experiences with computing. However, the national sample provides no evidence to support the control hypothesis. In this study, women using computers had slightly worse jobs and more stress-related symptoms than those not using computers, and these negative associations with computerization weren't reduced if they had more control. It is likely that factors other than control had important impact on how computering technology was designed, deployed and used. Good design and good implementation, however they come about, may be more important that the users' control per se.”
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Galegher, Jolene, Kraut, Robert E. and Egido, Carmen (eds.) (1990): Intellectual Teamwork: Social and Technological Foundations of Cooperative Work. Hillsdale, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
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» 1989 «
Kraut, Robert E., Dumais, Susan T. and Koch, Susan (1989): Computerization, Productivity, and Quality of Work-Life. In Communications of the ACM, 32 (2) pp. 220-238
» 1988 «
Kraut, Robert E., Egido, Carmen and Galegher, Jolene (1988): Patterns of Contact and Communication in Scientific Research Collaboration. In: Greif, Irene (ed.) Proceedings of the 1988 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work September 26 - 28, 1988, Portland, Oregon, United States. pp. 1-12.
“In this paper, we describe the influence of physical proximity on the development of collaborative relationships between scientific researchers and on the execution of their work. Our evidence is drawn from our own studies of scientific collaborators, as well as from observations of research and development activities collected by other investigators. These descriptions provide the foundation for a discussion of the actual and potential role of communications technology in professional work, especially for collaborations carried out at a distance.”
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Leland, Mary D. P., Fish, Robert S. and Kraut, Robert E. (1988): Collaborative Document Production Using Quilt. In: Greif, Irene (ed.) Proceedings of the 1988 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work September 26 - 28, 1988, Portland, Oregon, United States. pp. 206-215.
“Quilt is a computer-based tool for collaborative document production. It provides annotation, messaging, computer conferencing, and notification facilities to support communication and information sharing among the collaborators on a document. Views of a document tailored to individual collaborators or to other of the document's users are provided by Quilt based on the user's position in a permission hierarchy that reflects an extensible set of social roles and communication types. This paper illustrates how Quilt could be used by collaborators to produce a document.”
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Fish, Robert S., Kraut, Robert E. and Leland, Mary D. P. (1988): Quilt: A Collaborative Tool for Cooperative Writing. In: Allen, Robert (ed.) Proceedings of the Conference on Office Information Systems 1988 March 23-25, 1988, Palo Alto, California, USA. pp. 30-37.
“Quilt is a computer-based tool for collaborative writing, which provides annotation, messaging, computer conferencing, and notification facilities to support communication and information sharing among the collaborators on a document. In addition, extensible sets of social roles and communication types are used to provide views of a document tailored to individual collaborators or to other users of the document based upon their position in a permission hierarchy. This paper describes the rationale for and design of Quilt.”
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Dumais, Susan, Kraut, Robert E. and Koch, Susan (1988): Computers' Impact on Productivity and Work Life. In: Allen, Robert (ed.) Proceedings of the Conference on Office Information Systems 1988 March 23-25, 1988, Palo Alto, California, USA. pp. 88-95.
“Rapid spread of computer and telecommunication technologies throughout white-collar work has forced researchers to consider their impacts on the people who use them. The present study uses a multi-method, lagged, time-series design to examine the impact of a computerized record system on the work life of customer service representatives in a large utility company. Results show that the computer technology had mixed effects in terms of both productivity and quality of working life, and that these effects varied depending on local organizational culture, management quality, type of worker and their detailed work tasks. Furthermore, during the year in which the computer system was being introduced, the computer system itself, its methods of use, and the managerial goals that spawned it all evolved in response to workers and other factors. These results are used to illustrate the conceptual and methodological complexities involved in establishing the causal impact of computer technology, and to suggest alternate methods for thinking about and measuring technological impact.”
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» 1987 «
Kraut, Robert E., Galegher, Jolene and Egido, Carmen (1987): Relationships and Tasks in Scientific Research Collaboration. In Human-Computer Interaction, 3 (1) pp. 31-58
“What are the requirements on computer- and telecommunications-based tools to aid groups in producing intellectual products? In this article we examine research collaborations as a particularly informative example of group work and propose a framework for describing research collaboration that should provide guidance to those developing technology to support collaborative work. The framework is based on 50 semistructured interviews with researchers in psychology, management science, and computer science. It focuses on the problems in forming and maintaining personal relationships and completing tasks that researchers must solve to have a successful collaboration. These problems occur when collaborators are initiating projects, executing them, and documenting results.”
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» 1984 «
Hanson, Stephen J., Kraut, Robert E. and Farber, James M. (1984): Interface Design and Multivariate Analysis of UNIX Command Use. In ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 2 (1) pp. 42-57
“To understand how people interact with powerful computer systems, we analyzed, using several multivariate statistical analyses, the commands people use and the errors they made when performing office work with the UNIX operating system. The frequency of use across commands was very uneven. User's most frequent commands were those that performed editing-like functions on text and other objects (e.g., UNIX directories), those that returned orienting information to users, and those that helped to control and sequence other commands. People made mistakes frequently, and made them most, when they needed information about the command and file context in which they were working, and when they had to plan long sequences of commands without feedback. From these analyses we make several recommendations for a human-computer interface.”
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» 1983 «
Kraut, Robert E., Hanson, Stephen J. and Farber, James M. (1983): Command Use and Interface Design. In: Smith, Raoul N., Pew, Richard W. and Janda, Ann (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 83 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conferenc December 12-15, 1983, Boston, Massachusetts, United States. pp. 120-124.
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