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Comment Review System

The final form document that was sent to the membership for critical evaluation was composed of 28 chapters. At the time that comments were attached as hypertext links to the Scribe form document, an additional document was created to hold the comments that were of a general nature. Therefore, the task of the editor was to review the 1905 identified comments in 29 sub-documents, which we refer to as chapters.

The POSIX editor who was the primary subject of this study generated sixteen logged sessions reflecting approximately 20 hours of CASCADE activity. During the 16 sessions for which data is available, the technical editor worked on 15 chapters. A total of 275 comments were addressed. The editor added a review comment whose average length was 35 characters and spent 7 seconds entering the characters. The overall time spent on an average comment resolution was about 2 minutes.

The sample session shown in Figure 9 is a graphical description of a session that lasted 220 minutes. During this time the editor worked on 111 comments and/or objections. The maximum length of the editor's note on the comment was 171 characters. The average note size and the range of sizes is very easy to determine from the figure (mean = 40 characters, range = 1 - 171). In addition to statistical descriptions of the data, many potentially interesting features emerge upon inspection of the visualization, e.g., length of pauses between commenting, relation of comment length to pause length, trends in comment length relative to the cumulative length of the session. Although our visual analysis of the keystroke and button press logs is still very simple, visualization of the data has added a new dimension which we believe has great promise. The combination of detailed logs and a plan for using visual representations to locate areas of interest in sessions should allow us to make predictions about types of user activity that might be augmented.



next up previous
Next: Editorial Task Usability Up: Results Previous: Mailparsing



Michael Spring
Tue Apr 23 13:23:13 EDT 1996