Conference Paper

#26 

@inproceedings{McGrath2012, title={Branch-Explore-Merge: Facilitating Real-Time Revision Control in Collaborative Visual Exploration}, author={Will McGrath and Brian Bowman and David McCallum and Juan-David Hincapie-Ramos and Niklas Elmqvist and Pourang Irani}, url={http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~elm/projects/bem/bem.pdf}, year={2012}, date={2012-01-01}, journal={Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces}, booktitle={Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces}, pages={235--244}, abstract={Collaborative work is characterized by participants seamlessly transitioning from working together (coupled) to working alone (decoupled). Groupware should therefore facilitate smoothly varying coupling throughout the entire collaborative session. Towards achieving such transitions for collaborative exploration and search, we propose a protocol based on managing revisions for each collaborator exploring a dataset. The protocol allows participants to diverge from the shared analysis path (branch), study the data independently (explore), and then contribute back their findings onto the shared display (merge). We apply this concept to collaborative search in multidimensional data, and propose an implementation where the public view is a tabletop display and the private views are embedded in handheld tablets. We then use this implementation to perform a qualitative user study involving a real estate dataset. Results show that participants leverage the BEM protocol, spend significant time using their private views (40% to 80% of total task time), and apply public view changes for consultation with collaborators.}, keywords={}, }