How the Web is used to support collaborative writing
Behaviour and Information TechnologyPublished 1 July 2003
Sylvie Noël, Jean‐Marc Robert
Citations47
SJR quartileQ1
SJR score1.10
SNIP1.57
Generate an AI Snapshot to get a quick, structured summary of this paper.
Study Snapshot
ObjectiveStudy objective
MethodsResearch methodology
PopulationPopulation studied
Sample sizeSample sizes
OutcomesStudy outcomes here
ResultsStudy results comes here
LimitationsResearch study limitations comes here
A concise AI-generated summary of the paper will appear here once you click Generate AI Snapshot.
TL;DR
The aim of this article is to present the state of the art on the use of the Web for collaborative writing and thus help designers improve current systems or define future systems, and help users choose the most appropriate system to support their needs.
Abstract
We present 19 systems that have been developed over the past decade to support collaborative writing over the Web. The aim of this article is to present the state of the art on the use of the Web for collaborative writing and thus (1) help designers improve current systems or define future systems, and (2) help users choose the most appropriate system to support their needs. Among available systems, groups can select from tools to write a document (on- or off-line), collect comments about a document, or maintain a Web site. The lack of experimental data concerning Web-based applications forces designers to use other sources of information to guide their design choices, such as a list of functions that an ideal collaborative writing tool should offer. This list has revealed several potential points for improvement.
Keywords
Computer Science
Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces
2,468 Citations1992Paul Dourish, Victoria Bellotti
A study of shared editor use is discussed which suggests that awareness information provided and exploited passively through the shared workspace, allows users to move smoothly between close and loose collaboration, and to assign and coordinate work dynamically.
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionDistributed cognition
2,173 Citations2000James D. Hollan, Edwin Hutchins +1 more
This article proposes distributed cognition as a new foundation for human-computer interaction, sketches an integrated research framework, and uses selections from earlier work to suggest how this framework can provide new opportunities in the design of digital work materials.
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionAchieving convergence, causality preservation, and intention preservation in real-time cooperative editing systems
584 Citations1998Chengzheng Sun, Xiaohua Jia +3 more
A consistency model, with properties of convergence, causality preservation, and intention preservation, is proposed as a framework for consistency maintenance in real-time cooperative editing systems and an integrated set of schemes and algorithms are devised.
College Composition and CommunicationSingular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing
529 Citations1991John Trimbur, Andrea A. Lunsford +1 more
Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford challenge the assumption that writing is a solitary act and urge a fundamental change in institutions to accommodate collaboration by radically resituating power in the classroom and by instituting rewards for collaborative work that equal rewards for single-authored work.
Operational transformation in real-time group editors
490 Citations1998Chengzheng Sun, Clarence A. Ellis
An integrative review of the evolution of operational tra=formation techniques, with the go~ of identifying the major is-m, dgotiths, achievements, and remaining Mlenges, and a new optimized generic operational transformation control algorithm.
International Journal of Human-Computer StudiesBasic support for cooperative work on the World Wide Web
294 Citations1997Richard Bentley, Wolfgang Appelt +6 more
The current version of the BSCW Shared Workspace system is described in detail, including design choices resulting from use of the web as a cooperation platform and feedback from users following the release of a previous version of BSCW to the public domain.
Medical Entomology and ZoologyReadings in Groupware and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: Assisting Human-Human Collaboration
269 Citations1992Ronald M. Baecker
This comprehensive introduction to the field represents the best of the published literature on groupware and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and is a complete sourcebook to this field.
The mechanics of collaboration: developing low cost usability evaluation methods for shared workspaces
220 Citations2002Carl Gutwin, Saul Greenberg
A conceptual framework that articulates the mechanics of collaboration for shared-workspace groupware: the low level actions and interactions that must be carried out to complete a task in a shared manner is introduced.
Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)The World Wide Web as Enabling Technology for CSCW: The Case of BSCW
173 Citations1997Richard Bentley, Thilo Horstmann +1 more
It is concluded that despitelimitations in the range of applications which can bedirectly supported, building on the strengths of theWeb can give significant benefits in easing the development and deployment of CSCW applications.
Using Web annotations for asynchronous collaboration around documents
173 Citations2000J. J. Cadiz, Anop Gupta +1 more
A case study of annotations created by members of a large development team using Microsoft Office 2000- approximately 450 people created 9,000 shared annotations on about 1,250 documents over 10 months is presented.
Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)Empirical Study on Collaborative Writing: What Do Co-authors Do, Use, and Like?
164 Citations2004Sylvie Noël, Jean–Marc Robert
The great variability that exists between collaborative writing projects, whether it be group membership, management, writing strategy, or scheduling issues, is confirmed.
How People Write Together
161 Citations1992Ilona Posner, Ronald M. Baecker
A taxonomy of joint writing based on an analysis of interviews with authors who have written documents together is presented, which describes joint writing in terms of four components: roles played in the collaboration, activities performed in the writing process, document control methods used, and writing strategies employed.
Human-Computer InteractionLet's Stop Pushing the Envelope and Start Addressing It: A Reference Task Agenda for HCI
130 Citations2000Steve Whittaker, Loren Terveen +1 more
This work identifies a problem with the process of research in the human-computer interaction (HCI) community-an overemphasis on "radical invention" at the price of achieving a common research focus.
Work, Locales and Distributed Social Worlds
109 Citations1995Geraldine Fitzpatrick, William J. Tolone +1 more
Anselm Strauss' (1993) Theory of Action is proposed as a candidate from which to evolve a framework to ground an understanding of work, thus providing a bridge between the social and the technical.
Computer supported cooperative workResearch Issues in the Study of Computer Supported Collaborative Writing
106 Citations1993Mike Sharples, J. S. Goodlet +4 more
In this chapter, issues central to the investigation of computer support for collaborative writing are set out, extending previous work to develop cognitive support systems for single writers.
WebDAV
90 Citations1999E. James Whitehead, Yaron Goland
A protocol-centric approach to collaborative authoring is explored by examining the requirements and functionality of the WebDAV protocol, providing an upward migration path for existing non-collaborative applications, support for remote manipulation of the namespace of documents, and simultaneous satisfaction of a wide range of functional requirements.
Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)Collaborative Writing Is Hard to Support: A Field Study of Collaborative Writing
70 Citations1997Susan G. Tammaro, Jane N. Mosier +2 more
It is concluded that although collaborative writing is difficult to support and the currently available collaborative writing tools need to be improved before they can meet the needs of most co-writers, they are adequate for some types of tasks.
Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)Challenges for Cooperative Work on the Web: An Analytical Approach
69 Citations1997Alan Dix
Analytical methods developed in the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work are used to investigate the reasons for the World Wide Web's present success, its strengths and weaknesses as a platform for CSCW, and prospects for future development.
IEEE Internet ComputingReal time cooperative editing on the Internet
62 Citations2000Yun Yang, Chengzheng Sun +2 more
The REDUCE system's strategies include a novel consistency model and responsiveness techniques that permit arbitrary order in executing independent operations.
Computer supported cooperative workA Survey of Experiences of Collaborative Writing
54 Citations1993Erwin Beck
Learning to write together using groupware
45 Citations1995Alex Mitchell, Ilona Posner +1 more
An ethnographic study of collaborative writing by two groups of 4 grade six students using synchronous collaborative writing software for one hour per week over a 12 week period, finding that novice writers are uncertain as to how to proceed, and often have difficulty even understanding what is meant by collaborative writing.
Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)Distributed Coordination and Workflow on the World Wide Web
43 Citations1997Antonietta Grasso, Jean-Luc Meunier +2 more
The general WebFlow architecture for distributed coordination services on the World Wide Web is described, and then a focus is focused on the environment for distributed workflow.
Computer supported cooperative workAdding a Little Structure to Collaborative Writing
31 Citations1993Mike Sharples
Until the process of collaborative writing is better understood, writers should use existing media such as telephone, fax and electronic mail (email), and develop their own conventions to manage and coordinate the work.
Contact: Support for Distributed Cooperative Writing
31 Citations1995Andrew Kirby, Tom Rodden
A novel system to support the activities of distributed cooperative writing that provides facilities to represent the decomposition of the writing task and assignment of responsibilities and a series of monitoring facilities is provided.
Using Versioning to Provide Collaboration on the WWW
29 Citations1995Fabio Vitali, David Durand
GSS collaboration in document development: using GroupWriter to improve the process
25 Citations2003Mark Adkins, J.Q. Reinig +2 more
This paper focuses on the development of both facilitation processes and GroupWriter as a collaborative writing fool to support both synchronous and asynchronous distributed users.
Studies of Computer Supported Collaborative Writing Implications for System Design
23 Citations2002Teresa Cerratto, Henrry Rodríguez
The results show that the use of a CSCW system presents constraints in the collaborative activity; in particular a cleavage that makes co-authors write different parts of a common document independently, i.e. without collaborating.
Computer Networks and ISDN SystemsIn-place editing of Web pages: Sparrow community-shared documents
22 Citations1998Bay-Wei Chang
Lightweight, in-place editing makes it easy for users to contribute to Web pages, thereby making community-shared documents more useful as they grow and change with new information.
PINAS: a middleware for Web distributed cooperative authoring
18 Citations2002Dominique Decouchant, Jesús Favela +1 more
The PINAS platform is presented, which provides means for supporting cooperative authoring on the Web, and seamless extensions to standard Web services that can be fully integrated within the Web environment are proposed.
Communication and shared understanding in collaborative writing
16 Citations1996Alex Mitchell
Structured Cooperative Authoring for the World Wide Web
9 Citations1997Manuel Romero Salcedo, Dominique Decouchant
Lecture notes in computer scienceA Cooperative, Deductive, and Self-Adaptive Web Authoring Environment
9 Citations2000Dominique Decouchant, Ana María Martínez Enríquez
AllianceWeb is presented, an editing and cooperative authoring system on the Web that proposes a mixed architecture (hybrid and/or fully distributed) for the document storage and access and is integrated to provide a concerted, secure and parameterizable cooperative editing support.
An environment for the collaborative revision of digital theses
7 Citations2002Luis Fernández Sanz, J. Alfredo Sánchez +1 more
Zeus is an asynchronous cooperative toolset which allows the revision and annotation of digital theses over the Internet and students working on their theses are provided with a highly personalizable environment which simplifies the process of reviewing electronic documents.
Multi-user publishing in the Web: DReSS, a Document Repository Service Station
5 Citations1996Pme Paul De Bra, Atm Ad Aerts
DReSS is presented, a system to enable authors to deposit (and update) documents on a WWW server, using standard WWW features only, and suggestions for new browser and server features that could improve the authoring process significantly are indicated.
Supporting the writing of reports in a hierarchical organization
3 Citations1999Andreas Girgensohn
The experiences indicate that it is possible to change a monthly reporting practice so that the system is easy to use, improves the quality of the written report, fosters collaboration across projects and creates a corporate memory for the company.