Agenda, Tuesday, 26 May 1998

Handouts

• Today's agenda.
• Proposals (only in electronic form).
• Two papers by Tricia Jones as background reading.

Administrative Details

• I would like someone to take minutes for each meeting we have. The minutes should summarize our discussions and our goals for the next meeting (which we will discuss at the end of each meeting). We will rotate this role.
• I'd like you to use laboratory notebooks for this project. All your notes for the summer should go in those notebooks. We will pick some up after lunch.
• The web pages for this project can be found at http://www.math.grin.edu/~rebelsky/Research/Summer1998/ .
• Today's agenda is much more textual than the rest will be.

Background

• Recall that the intended form of Summer research projects is described in the standard letter, which reads,

  The proposed summer research program will enable students to experience all phases of a research project. At the onset, the faculty supervisor will work with the student to develop a project. After reading appropriate background material, the student will prepare a written proposal which clearly articulates the problem and the planned approaches to solve the problem. The faculty supervisor will then direct and advise the student's investigative work through the ten-week period. During the project students and faculty will have opportunities to discuss their research with peers. At the end of the project, the student will write a paper in the style of an academic journal article and prepare a poster [to present] to the campus community at the annual Science Division Research Symposium. We anticipate from past experience that many students will also present talks and posters at professional meetings and that some will be co-authors of papers submitted to refereed journals.

• It is clear that we will not follow this plan exactly, as we already have an articulated problem (or problems) and we are dealing with a group rather than a single student. However, our goal for this week will be to more clearly articulate our possible approaches to the problems.
• As we begin to select plan, subprojects, and roles I will also begin to develop a more comprehensive plan as to particular targets to meet.
• I will warn you that I'd like you to have short papers ready by early to mid August for submissions to the Small Colleges Computing Consortium.

The Main Project

• You may recall that our project is to provide an interactive system to analyze web usage. What do I mean by that? I mean something that provides detailed information about how readers use webs.
• What detailed information?
  • Sequence of pages viewed (okay, it's not quite a sequence since multiple windows are possible). This may also be "sequence of types of pages viewed".
  • Amount of time on each page
  • Where people go when they leave the web
  • Where people come from when they enter the web
• How do we present it interactively?
  • Text sequences
  • Visual sequences
  • With methods for selection
• What tasks are there?
  • Recording the information (at various points)
  • Presenting the information
  • Related tasks: identification subsystem, page transformation, synchronization, etc.

The Secondary Project

• Note that two projects were funded: the main web analysis project and a second more general project (to work on other aspects of SiteWeaver and interactive sites).
• For the second, I'd like to focus on user annotations of web pages, but we may move on to other things if that turns out to be too easy.
• The initial plans for that person will be to

Discussion

• Who are we?
• Why are we here?
• What are our initial interests?
• What background do we have?
• What have I forgotten?

Goals

For tomorrow,

• Read the various handouts
• Decide which tasks you'd prefer
• See if you can identify other interesting or useful resources. One other paper is http://www.oit.itd.umich.edu/~cberger/aera95bjfolder/aera95bj.html
• Start thinking about the appropriate format of the log file