Pilot: Supporting Creativity in the Analysis and Understanding of Visually Complex Documents

该项目检查视觉复杂的文档？文本和图形元素的组合，可能是由几个不同的人在一段时间内的多次交互产生的。 在这个项目中将采取的方法是通过技术来帮助人们表达，评估和假设解构，从而使人类的独创性。 为实现这一目标，该项目将分三个阶段进行。 在第一阶段，我们将了解多个研究领域的学者如何创建，使用和分析视觉复杂的文档。 然后，这些信息将用于指导软件原型的开发，允许手动辅助将这些文档解构为其组成部分，并允许读者设定各部分之间的结构关系。 原型将被放入一个研究小组，并将在第三阶段对其使用情况进行评估，这项研究的试点工作将侧重于从事文化遗产材料工作的学者。虽然需要与视觉上复杂的文档进行交互是司空见惯的，但在文化遗产领域尤为迫切。他们将专门与船舶重建实验室合作，该实验室是德克萨斯A M大学海洋考古中心的一部分。考古学是一门学科，它借鉴了广泛的学科研究，包括STEM和人文学科。这一事实使其成为一个特别有用的研究领域，以便开发与许多不同学科的人们的需求相关的模型和工具。视觉上复杂的文档是几乎所有学术和企业领域的核心组成部分，包括科学、工程、商业、艺术和人文学科。几乎所有的研究人员和实践者都处理包括空间上重要的元素的文档，所述空间上重要的元素诸如文本、草图、注释、速记以及个人或共享的视觉符号。 文本和图形元素的空间排列有助于文档？的含义与文档的实际文字或图像相结合。这些关系对于读者来说通常是视觉上明显的，但是它们的实际呈现并不表示它们，因为元素必须被展平以显示在二维表面（物理或数字）上。直接表达和操纵他们以前失去的结构的能力？换句话说，将文档分解成其组成部分？是理解或分析所必需的。这样的分解可以是空间的、时间的，或者可以反映其他特性。 值得注意的是，如何最好地分解文档并不总是很清楚。这项任务是一个创造性的过程，需要支持对文件丢失的中间形式的交替解构和重建。在这个分析过程中，当分析师反复表达不同的潜在信息层并与这些表达进行交互时，理解就会出现。

The project examines visually-complex documents?combination of textual and graphical elements, perhaps resulting from multiple interactions by several different people over a span of time. The approach that will be taken in this project is to enable human ingenuity through technology that helps people express, evaluate, and hypothesize about deconstructions. To accomplish this, the project will be conducted in three phases. In the first phase, we will gain an understanding of how visually-complex documents are created, used, and analyzed by scholars in multiple fields of study. This information will then be used to guide the development of a software prototype allowing manually-assisted deconstruction of these documents into their component parts, as well as allowing readers to posit structural relationships among the parts. The prototype will be placed into a research group and its use will be evaluated in the third phase.The pilot work for this research will focus on scholars working with cultural heritage materials. While the need to interact with visually complex documents is commonplace, it is particularly pressing in the domain of cultural heritage. They will work specifically with the Ship Reconstruction Lab, part of the Center for Maritime Archaeology at Texas A&M University. Archaeology is a discipline that draws on research from a wide range of academic disciplines, both STEM and humanistic. This fact makes it a particularly useful area to study in order to develop models and tools that will be relevant for the needs of people in many different disciplines. Visually complex documents are a central component of almost all areas of scholarship and enterprise, including science, engineering, business, arts, and humanities?almost all researchers and practitioners deal with documents that include spatially significant elements such as text, sketches, annotations, shorthand, and personal or shared visual notations. The spatial arrangement of text and graphical elements contribute to the document?s meaning in conjunction with the actual words or images of the document. These relationships are often visually apparent to a reader, but their actual presentation does not represent them because the elements must be flattened to be displayed on a two dimensional surface (physical or digital). The ability to directly express and manipulate their previously-lost structure?in other words to decompose the document into its constituent parts?is required for understanding or to enable analysis. Such decompositions may be spatial, temporal, or may reflect other characteristics. Significantly, it is not always clear how a document is best decomposed. This task is a creative process that requires support for alternate deconstructions and re-constructions of lost intermediate forms of the document. During this analysis, understanding will emerge as the analyst iteratively expresses different potential information layers and interacts with those expressions.