Collecting and Structuring Information in the Information Collage

TL;DR

This paper introduces the concept of an information collage, a browser extension that combines manual organization and automatic analysis to improve how knowledge workers gather, structure, and explore information from multiple sources.

Contribution

It presents the design and evaluation of an innovative web browser extension called information collage, enabling better integration and visualization of diverse information sources for knowledge workers.

Findings

Identified three user strategies for collecting and structuring information.

Provided design recommendations based on observed usage patterns.

Demonstrated the effectiveness of the information collage in case studies.

Abstract

Knowledge workers, such as scientists, journalists, or consultants, adaptively seek, gather, and consume information. These processes are often inefficient as existing user interfaces provide limited possibilities to combine information from various sources and different formats into a common knowledge representation. In this paper, we present the concept of an information collage (IC) -- a web browser extension combining manual spatial organization of gathered information fragments and automatic text analysis for interactive content exploration and expressive visual summaries. We used IC for case studies with knowledge workers from different domains and longer-term field studies over a period of one month. We identified three different ways how users collect and structure information and provide design recommendations how to support these observed usage strategies.