Augmented Conceptual Analysis of the Web: Call for Participation

This call for participation is kept on the Web for reference purposes. Since the workshop has already taken place in March 1997, we obviously don't want anybody to apply to particiate.

A workshop at the ACM CHI97 conference on computer-human interaction, Atlanta, GA. This workshop is by invitation only and took place Sunday, March 23 and Monday, March 24, 1997.

DEADLINE: Applications for participation in the workshop must be received no later than Friday, January 10, 1997

Workshop Organizers

Wendy A. Kellogg is a Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, where her recent work has concerned Internet software for students and teachers, and for which she received Outstanding Technical Achievement awards from IBM in 1995 and 1996. She was General Co-Chair of CHI'94, and has served in a variety of other CHI technical and organizing positions. Dr. Kellogg has been attending and organizing CHI workshops since 1989, participating in workshops at CHI'89, CHI'91, and CHI'95, and co-organizing workshops at CHI'92 and INTERCHI'93.

Jakob Nielsen is a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer working on advanced Web technology at SunSoft, Sun's software planet. He was Papers co-chair for INTERCHI'93 and has served in a variety of other CHI and SIGCHI positions. Dr. Nielsen has chaired or co-chaired workshops at CHI+GI'87, CHI'88, CHI'92, and CHI'94 and participated in several additional CHI workshops. He writes the monthly Alertbox column on Web usability.

Workshop Topic

In the history of computing, there has been nothing comparable to the World Wide Web. No one predicted the Web or its unprecedented growth, which continues almost unabated today. This pace of change has made the task of gaining perspective on the Web difficult. The purpose of this workshop is to gain such perspective by driving up the level of abstraction in considering observable Web phenomena. We seek to create conceptual leverage to augment our understanding of what the Web is, and what it will become in the future. Our goal is to provide professionals who are involved in creating the Web the analytical tools to better understand this rapidly changing landscape. In other words, when something new appears on the Web (as it surely will tomorrow), the concepts and perspectives developed in this workshop will enable us to better understand it; both in isolation and in relation to other Web phenomena.

The analyses we seek to develop in the workshop must be grounded in observable phenomena. For example, there has recently been an observable antagonism between content providers and indexing services on the Web. Search engines, fed by crawler technology, have become a dominant means for users to discover new information of interest on the Web. The advantages to content providers of being listed at or near to the top of a user's search results are enormous: good positioning in the list confers the power to attract users' attention and time. As a result, creators of Web pages can be observed to deliberately strategize to maximize their "score" with the crawlers and search engines. Their strategies have ranged from the subtle, for example, naming pages to occur first in alphabetized lists, to blatant pandering, for example, repeating likely search keywords in a paragraph at the bottom of the page. In response, crawlers and search engines have begun to be more sophisticated in how they assess a page's content -- for example, ignoring or discounting repeated (in a row) instances of a keyword.

The example above might be understood within an evolutionary perspective on analogy to a scenario of co-evolution (e.g., of predator and prey), or by an information-theoretic analysis of the cost structure of discovering information, such as Pirolli and Card's (1995) analysis of information foraging. Applying a perspective or an analogy to an observed phenomenon can increase the level of abstraction at which it is characterized. The workshop will seek to exploit this by developing an inventory of significant Web phenomena, and investigating a variety of perspectives, such as evolutionary analysis, to abstract away from the details of particular examples. Useful perspectives may be historical, empirical, social, political, biological, information-theoretic, technological, human-computer interaction, or evolutionary. Some of these will no doubt prove more useful than others in provoking insight. One outcome of the workshop will be an understanding of which abstractions are productive.

We note that there are several unique features that make the Web an interesting domain for analysis:

Unprecedented rapid growth and change.
The Web's reach to more people than ever (by the time of the workshop there may be 2 million web sites and thus on the order of 2 million user interface designers!).
Macro-CSCW. Millions of users cooperating via the web suggests the need for an analysis that contrasts ad hoc collaboration from the intentional collaboration that is the signature of traditional CSCW.
Cross-platform. What are the tradeoffs for developers and users?
Slow-link client-servers. People's patience, rather than technical feasibility, has become the upper limit on design.
Authoring is getting harder. HTML is no longer enough for leading-edge Web design. The schism between professional and amateur content providers, and those with and without technical know-how is widening.
Proxies. Proxies offer the possibility of augmenting, or radically altering information passed between clients and servers. This possibility touches on a number of potent issues, e.g., intellectual property, privacy, derivative works, etc.
Evolution of protocols. New protocols are emerging, creating an ever-changing landscape for the Web.
E-commerce. As commerce grows in importance, many new concepts for buying and selling goods, driven by technological innovation, will emerge.

Call for Participation

This is a two-day workshop, meant to be focused and intense, with about twelve participants. Considerable effort will be asked of participants, both before and during the workshop, since our goal is to push the envelope of our understanding about the Web. We have a preliminary workshop agenda available.

Because of the need to be very selective in accepting participants for the workshop, we ask that prospective participants send us an application no later than January 10, 1997. Applications should be on the order of 500 words and should outline the prospective participant's professional background and current projects with an emphasis on achievements in the areas of the Web, other online services, human-computer interaction, and hypertext. Please provide URLs for any sites you have designed or built as well as references to any major publications you have written in these fields.

We welcome strong participants from both academia and industry and will aim at having a spectrum of theoretical and practical backgrounds and a variety of disciplines represented at the workshop.

Since we can accept only a very small number of participants, we do not want you to write a full position paper before knowing whether you can attend the workshop. Accepted participants should write position papers with an in-depth analysis of the Web from a given perspective. If you have an idea for a perspective you would want to apply, then please briefly explain that perspective in your initial application. The workshop chairs will collect all the proposed perspectives and assign each perspective to one or two accepted participants for development into a full position paper. If too many participants suggest the same perspective, some of them may be asked to develop another perspective.

Deadlines

Applications to participate in the workshop should be sent as plain ASCII text by electronic mail to kellogg@watson.ibm.com to arrive no later than Friday, January 10, 1997 at 5:00 PM Eastern Time (GMT -5). Please allow time for network delays.
In case of bouncing email, (and only in case you can't get through to kellogg@watson.ibm.com), send applications to jakob@useit.com instead.

Acceptance notifications will be sent to the selected participants Tuesday, January 21, 1997.

Each workshop participant will be required to write a position paper about conceptual analysis of the Web from a theoretical perspective that will be assigned by the workshop chairs. The deadline for the position papers is Monday, March 3, 1997.

The position papers will be circulated to all accepted workshop participants with the expectation that all participants will have read all the position papers before the start of the workshop.

Workshop Report

A report from the workshop will be posted to http://www.useit.com/chi97 a few months after the workshop.

This page is maintained by Jakob Nielsen, jakob@useit.com