Textual Annotation Tools for SAGE2

November 2nd, 2015

Categories: MS / PhD Thesis, User Groups, Remote Collaboration

Textual annotation being used in EVL's Cyber-Commons
Textual annotation being used in EVL's Cyber-Commons

About

Krishna Bhradwaj’s MS Thesis Defense

Committee: Andrew Johnson, Luc Renambot, Liz Marai

Abstract:
The amount of data that we deal with, on a daily basis, is ever increasing and coupled with the fact that display technology is getting cheaper by the day, this has led to the rise of large/scalable resolution display systems. With more and more people adopting large/scalable resolution display systems in their work places, these display systems are being used for data visualization as well as collaboration.

The complexity of data being visualized and the nature of collaborative tasks being carried out using large/scalable resolution displays are changing the way we use these displays. It is no longer enough to passively look at data on these displays. There is a growing need to actively engage and interact with the content. As such, large/scalable resolution display systems that handle large amounts of data need to provide adequate functionality to interact with this data. SAGE2 comes as an answer to this. It allows scalable displays to effectively act as platforms for data visualization and at the same time gives these systems the power of multi-user interaction. I propose two textual annotation tools to annotate documents and images in SAGE2. These annotation tools will further the capabilities of SAGE2 in terms of allowing users to collaborate. Through this thesis, I have evaluated these tools leading to insights about their usability, affordances, and limitations.