Reviewing Practices in Collaborative Writing - CiteSeerX

Computer Supported Cooperative Work 10: 247–259, 2001. © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Short paper

Reviewing Practices in Collaborative Writing HEE-CHEOL (EZRA) KIM and KERSTIN SEVERINSON EKLUNDH IPLAB (Interaction and Presentation Laboratory), Department of Numerical Analysis and Computer Science, The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden (E-mail: {heeki,kse}@nada.kth.se) (Received 20 September 2000) Abstract. This paper presents an interview study in which 11 academics as interviewees participated for the purpose of revealing common collaborative writing practices, with particular focus on reviewing documents. First, we present the findings obtained concerning the issues of co-operating strategies underlying the reviewing process, how people revise their documents and comment on them, what they use the previous revision history for, and to what extent current technology is used in the reviewing process. Second, we also discuss aspects of the design of collaborative writing tools. Key words: change notification, change representation, collaborative writing, comment, communication, coordination, practice, revision history, reviewing, version management

1. Introduction Collaborative writing is hard and complicated to support. Many cases have been reported in the literature showing that advanced collaborative writing tools have not been used as much as the developers anticipated. For example, Trigg and Suchman have argued for the advantages of hypertext-based co-authoring tools supporting the generation and organization of ideas (Trigg and Suchman, 1989). However, these systems have not actually succeeded to be used widely for collaborative writing (Dillon, 1993). Further, shared editors have been designed to help writers edit a common text simultaneously. However, the overall use of such a tool fell short of expectations (Cerratto, 1999a; Rao et al., 1996). A main reason for this phenomenon is that the gap between theoretical assumptions and reality was larger than researchers thought. Researchers have thus gradually recognized that a more realistic understanding of collaborative writing is essential to build the systems that people really want (Rimmershaw, 1992; Beck and Bellotti, 1993; Dillon and Maynard, 1995). The belief of such researchers is obviously that coauthoring practices in reality should be the fundamental basis for the design of usable systems. They also think that the shortcomings of theoretical assumptions are reinforced by a careful look at actual practices. The main concern underlying this study has been to give an account of co-authoring practices in the academic community, with special focus on the phase of reviewing documents. Here, the

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notion of “reviewing” is associated with the stages in writing where comments and revisions on the document are made among the collaborators. Collaborating writers sometimes face various problems during the reviewing process. For example, Neuwirth et al. (1990) noted that writers could not understand comments well, and were even frustrated due to inconsistent comments. Cross also reported that collaborating writers had encountered problems of understanding text caused by unexplained changes made by each writer (Cross, 1990). In the interviews conducted by Baecker et al. (1993), a writer complained, “I would get e-mail saying change page 4 line 2, but in my version page 4 is completely different”, revealing difficulties in keeping track of different versions. Against the background of these problems, the present study has been designed to understand the reviewing process with the purpose to inform design implications. We address the following issues in this paper: 1. What are the common co-operating strategies within groups? 2. How do people review documents together? 2.1 How do people manage revisions and comment on the document? 2.2 What do they use previous revision history for? 2.3 To what extent is current technology used to review the document? The first issue is important to deal with, because reviewing practices depend highly upon co-operating strategies used among group members (Sharples et al., 1993, p. 25). Those strategies rely on such factors as group size, document types, working places, etc. With respect to the second issue, we explore several aspects of how people coordinate their writing tasks and communicate about reviewing their documents. Issue 2.1 is about the management of comments and changes of text: what media are used for commenting, how people inform others of changes, how they change the parts written by others, and how the change of membership is. Issue 2.2 mainly addresses when writers need previous versions and revisions. This issue is interesting because there is little investigation of actual usage of versions or revisions in the real world production of text, even though there has been some research on how to develop version control mechanisms (see e.g., Malcolm, 1991; Gains, 1994; Bäcker and Busbach, 1996). On this issue, we also wanted to gather opinions from the interviewees concerning whether a playback function, which helps users play the writing session back and forward to see how the text evolved, can be useful for collaborating writers to understand changes. Concerning Issue 2.3, we want to see how people use current technology particularly including two features to support collaborative writing in word processors: commenting functions to annotate on electronic documents, and change representation functions to display changed parts. We conducted one-hour interviews with 11 academics with co-authoring experiences to address these issues. During the process of analyzing the data, our focus was on finding common collaborative writing practices. Some researchers addressed aspects of the diversity of co-authoring practices (Rimmershaw, 1992;

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Posner and Baecker, 1992), and others did those of flexibility and context sensitivity as characteristics of working patterns of writers adapting to different situations (Beck and Bellotti, 1993). In these studies, aspects such as flexibility, diversity, and complexity were stressed in order to avoid the mistake of designing malformed co-authoring tools built on a common-sense impression of collaboration or some assumptions incongruous with the actual way in which people write together. On the other hand, findings obtained from such interpretative analyses may provide too much and complicated information for designers, who face the difficulty of identifying what data are most important to consider for the design, and how to apply such information in the design process. As one way of mitigating this problem, we believe that finding common practices might be a way to provide designers with more useful hints for the design than describing diverse, flexible, and complicated ways of co-authoring.

2. The organization of the interviews One-hour interviews were conducted with 11 researchers, including 7 PhD holders and 4 PhD students, working at Stockholm University and the Royal Institute of Technology. They all had had co-authoring experiences before. The interviews focused on one or more papers written recently by the respondents, in order to facilitate a detailed understanding of the reviewing process. In all, 15 particular writing tasks were discussed with 11 individuals (See Table I). The interviews were tape-recorded and later transcribed. We chose the general interview guide approach (Patton, 1990, ch. 7). This implies performing interviews with a list of questions or issues to be asked, prepared in an outline form. Although topics and issues are thus determined beforehand, the interviewer has flexibility in sequencing and wording the questions.

3. Co-operating strategies for writing Document management: More centralized than distributed. The notion of managing a team document in this paper includes several activities, e.g., integrating a previous draft with a new version, merging different sections written by different members, distributing a new version to co-authors, etc. However, managing a document does not necessarily mean organizing the writing project and assigning various tasks to the members as a team leader. It concerns more editorial aspects. For convenience, we call the person who manages it document manager. With respect to the act of writing itself, the division of labor among members is common (e.g., Lunsford and Ede, 1986; Michailidis et al., 1994). However, when it comes to the act of managing a team document, our data shows that there is a tendency of a more centralized control of the document to one person. In most cases (13 of all 15 cases), once one person managed the document, (s)he played

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Table I. Overview of cases from 11 interviewees. Individuals

Cases

Interviewee A

Case 1 Case 2 Case 3 Case 4 Case 5 Case 6 Case 7 Case 8 Case 9 Case 10 Case 11 Case 12 Case 13 Case 14 Case 15

Interviewee B Interviewee C Interviewee D Interviewee E Interviewee F Interviewee G Interviewee H

Interviewee I Interviewee J Interviewee K

Writing Tool

Departments

Types of Doc.

Latex Word Word FM Word Latex Word Word Word Latex FM FM Latex Latex Word

Chem. eng.

journal paper conf. paper journal paper conf. paper project proposal journal paper annual report conf. paper conf. Paper conf. paper project proposal conf. paper journal paper journal paper journal paper

Chemistry Comp. Science Comp. Science Physics Elec. eng. Vehicle eng. Elec. eng.

Applied math. Mech. eng. System ecology

# of authors (+reviewers)

Working places

2 2 1(+5) 3 4(+1) 2 10 1(+1) 1(+1) 1(+1) 1(+4) 2 2 2 1(+4)

SP SP DP DP DP SP SP SP DP DP SP SP DP DP SP

* Word (MS Word), FM (FrameMaker) * SP (working at the same place), DP (working at different places)

the role of manager until the document was completed. In other two cases (case 2 and 14), the role of manager was passed back and forth between two authors. Dimension of time: Writing usually proceeds asynchronously. It is rare to write synchronously on the shared text, whereas synchronous work is common, e.g., typically holding physical meetings. We found that only three writing tasks were in part fulfilled synchronously (case 1, 2 and 9), where two members sit next to each other before the computer and took turns to dictate words at the keyboard or one member mainly typed them. In a study of writing groups using a synchronous co-authoring tool “Aspects”, Cerratto has found that participants, MBA students, got more advantages of the system at the collaborative reviewing phase than the composing phase (Cerratto, 1999b). According to her, composition concerns a creative and unplanned phase where co-writers reflect on and play with ideas. In fact, in a context where co-writers use a textual chat box for communication, composition becomes an individual phase. Interestingly, our data also shows that synchronous writing from the three cases took place when the documentation work was at the reviewing stage. In case 2, two authors wrote synchronously the summary part of their paper. Two other authors in another group proofread their document, mainly checking minor problems in formulation and spelling for a couple of hours (case 9). In case 1, the group almost spent a whole day, sitting together and modifying sentences over the whole text based on the previous version. “We sat down together. It was a very


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slow process. But I thought the product was actually better because we thought every single line all the way through” (Interviewee A). Group size: Small group writing is common. A questionnaire survey from about 20 academics has presented that 57% of the cases were proceeded by only two members, and the percentage drastically decreased as the group size grew (Beck, 1993). According to our data, a similar result was obtained: the maximum number of authors not including reviewers was 4 except for the case of writing an annual report, and 13 of the tasks were completed by two or three authors. Apparently, even in medium size or large group research work, only a few members tend to write the document (case 3, 11, and 15), though many more people are involved in the research phase. Such a pattern of writing often occurs in fields like physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine with experiments requiring many experimenters. The interviewee E from the department of physics explained this phenomenon, “When one or two people write, there is coherence. Otherwise, . . . If all write together, the text becomes strange.” According to him, small group writing is more efficient for keeping consistency of style, analysis of the data, perspectives of the result, and so on. Writing tool: One writing tool is decided on before writing. In all, three writing tools, MS Word, FrameMaker and Latex were used (see Table I). No participants had used any specialized collaborative writing tool. Members of a writing group sometimes had different favorite writing tools. In those cases, they tended to agree first which tool would be used for the writing task. As an example, the first author in case 14 preferred Latex while the second author had never used it before. They decided to use Latex, in spite that the second author needed some time to get acquainted with it. In cases 1 and 2, interviewee A used different tools, Latex and MS Word respectively, for different writing tasks. As a matter of fact, there were no cases in the data when different writing tools had been employed in the group. Some writers just contributed by writing plain texts and sending them via email (case 3, 4, and 9). Poor infrastructure of network environment From the analysis of the interviews, it emerged that a good network environment is the most important factor for a better collaboration. We have clearly seen that the respondents are not so familiar with work with a network. Usually, when one person had a document file on his own disk, other people did not tend to access his space to get the document nor put a changed document on it except for four cases in which authors were skilful computer users. Their co-authoring practice on the net consists mostly of exchanging emails and sending documents as attachment files in an email system. It seems that the technological and social infrastructure of the network environment is not settled well enough to facilitate collaboration. Interviewee F said briefly, “First we have to decide which word processor to use. Then the given network

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environment matters.” There is still a great difficulty to share resources with others. In fact, most cases (14 of all 15 cases) equipped no good network environment for managing and sharing documents.

4. Practices in the reviewing process In this section, we focus on three questions: how writers co-ordinate their work and communicate when they exchange comments and revise the document, what people use previous document versions and revisions for, and to what extent current technology helps their reviewing process.

4.1. HOW PEOPLE MANAGE COMMENTS AND CHANGES Commenting media: In all cases but case 8 and 11, people annotated on the paper copy of the document. This finding is consistent with the findings in some previous studies where the importance of the role of paper in work practices is described (Dillon and Maynard, 1995; Sellen and Harper, 1997). Even in distributed co-authoring, paper plays an important role for commenting. In three of all 7 distributed co-working cases, people made comments on the hard copy manuscript and sent it by fax (case 3, 4, and 13). Email is substantially used to comment (14 cases) as well as exchange document files (8 cases). We also found four cases (case 1, 6, 12, 14) where reviewers wrote their comments on on-line documents directly with special format, e.g., in italics and square brackets, which has been previously discussed in the literature (Beck and Bellotti, 1993). How co-authors are notified of changes. When a new version of a document is created, there are often many changes made to the text. According to the data, there is a tendency that people explain changes in a very general way, or do not inform each other about them. “I just said I made a few changes in a certain section. I didn’t tell what changes they were” (Interviewee J). “There was no need to say again what I changed, because we decided together what to change and so it was pretty obvious what would be new” (Interviewee C). Interestingly, some people also reported that they notified others of changes at a more detailed level by using change representation functions in their writing tools (cases 2 and 12). Unlikely to change the parts written by others on-line. In 13 of 15 cases, writers did not revise other members’ text on-line without contacting that member, except for small details like spelling error corrections. Some interviewees provided the reasons for it, e.g., to avoid hurting the feelings of other group members (Interviewee A). In fact, they tend to suggest ideas of how to change first, rather than revise the on-line document directly. In only one case (case 14), both two authors changed substantial amounts of parts written by the other author without saying


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anything about these changes. However, there was a consensus between them that they could change the other partner’s text freely before. Reviewers: The number of active participants gradually decreases. There were 3 cases where more than three people reviewed documents but did not write actively (cases 3, 11, 15). In all 3 cases, it emerged that there had been a decrease in the number of reviewers as documents evolved at the reviewing phase. For example, the main author in case 3 distributed the first draft to five reviewers, but sent the second draft to only three of them. The author said, “If you send the second version to all five authors again, then you will encounter the same problem that you spend a lot of time to resolve many people’s conflicting comments”. He clearly wanted to avoid conflict and confusion caused by different comments from many reviewers. In cases 11 and 15, some reviewers gave comments about the first or the second draft, but did not respond to later drafts. Beck has reported that the number of members changed rather than fixed over the whole writing process (Beck, 1993). She presented evidences for both decreases and increases. Considering her result and ours, we believe that there are dynamic aspects in terms of changes in membership during the whole writing process, and as the document is finalized, the number of reviewers decreases. 4.2. WHAT PREVIOUS REVISION HISTORY IS USED FOR For reuse of deleted parts Nine interviewees reported that they kept more than one previous version of the document, saving them as different files. Seven of them mentioned that the main reason for storing previous versions had been to guarantee access to deleted parts in the current draft. “I haven’t used the previous versions at all. But I saved them in order to be sure that nothing is lost.” (Interviewee J). “Something that we thought wasn’t required, but you want to get it back now.” (Interviewee H). Apparently, people do not feel free from anxiety caused by deleting text parts, taking reusability of those parts into consideration. In these writers’ point of view, previous versions of a document are needed as individual resources to keep deleted parts in the current version. A playback function may not be needed. The playback function has proved to be useful as a research tool to analyze cognitive processes of individual writing (Severinson Eklundh and Kollberg, 1996). What about the context of collaborative writing? Most interviewees expressed either that they feel no special need for a playback function (6 respondents), or that it is difficult to conceptualize the use of such a function without real use of it (3 respondents). Among the comments made were: “I don’t see why you would go back.” (Interviewee C), “I don’t think I would use it. . . . It’s hard to know before you get the feeling of the function.” (Interviewee K).

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Figure 1. An example of change representation from MS Word.

4.3. TO WHAT EXTENT CURRENT TECHNOLOGY HELPS REVIEW DOCUMENTS Computer support for reviewing Among other tools, we are interested in two special reviewing tools, commenting and change representation functions, to see the degree of actual usage of them. (1) Comment support: Both MS Word and FrameMaker allow users to write comments on any part of an on-line document. Surprisingly, the result shows that no one had used commenting functions for their co-authoring tasks. However, we do not think that this evidence justifies users’ reluctance to on-line commenting. Rather, as previously mentioned, interviewees often used email for commenting, and some (four cases) commented directly on the electronic documents with special format. Here, we speculate several reasons why people did not use commenting tools. First, long practiced ways of commenting with pen and paper and by talk are certainly a major reason. Second, it also emerged that most interviewees (5 of 7 MS word or FrameMaker users) did not even know about the existence of commenting functions. Third, the commenting function is lacking in usability, e.g., due to aspects of indirect manipulation. Fourth, poor network environment may inhibit the on-line reviewing. (2) Change representation: Changed parts are visualized by a line in the margin of the document and deleted and newly added texts can be displayed according to the user’s optional choice in FrameMaker and MS Word (See Figure 1). We found three cases where people had used a change representation function (case 3 with MS Word, case 12 with FrameMaker, and case 14 with the UNIX diff command). The fact that the computer can help record changes automatically makes authors feel free, to some extent, from the extra work of informing other members of detailed changes. It also seems beneficial to perceive and understand changes. Furthermore, the collaborators can save time in reviewing a new version, skipping or quickly scanning unchanged parts. However, change representation functions have a negative aspect of clutteredness of text caused by lots of strikethroughs and different colors to represent changes, which actually disturbs the flow of reading. No strong sense of difficulty in the reviewing process with current technology. The process of reviewing with current technology was not seen as difficult to the respondents (10 of 11 interviewees did not report any particular inconvenience with it). Without access to more advanced co-authoring tools, they tended to complete their writing tasks, being largely satisfied with current technology. Therefore, as


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Cockburn and Thimbleby (1991) mentioned it, if a new collaborative writing tool is designed, it has to have the features that co-authors’ personally favored writing tools provide, as well as the features to support collaborative writing.

5. Discussions concerning design Based on the findings, we discuss aspects of the design of co-authoring tools, which include both design implications and open issues for further development. Centralized document control. The results show that one author tends to manage a group document. A possible way to realize centralized document control is through the notion of ownership of the document. The author who has the ownership is the document manager described before, or document owner. He or she is responsible for collecting different sections from other authors or reviewers, making drafts at different times, controlling strategies of how to share the document with others, and the like. A good example reflecting such a centralized control is ‘Instant Update’ running on developed for the Macintosh by On technology. In that system, the document manager creates a document and sends it to the server. If he or she chooses co-authors to share the document, the server sends the document to the collaborators. The document manager can also send updated versions to the members, and control other aspects through a Document Management window. On the other hand, Miles et al. have suggested the provision of segment ownership (Miles et al., 1993, p. 153). The basic idea behind this is that when each author writes different parts, all authors but the segment owner access the segment as a read-only file, so that they cannot edit the segment written by others. However, our data shows that people did not make major changes of other people’s parts except for two cases, though segment ownership was not explicitly specified in the system. In fact, segment ownership was better understood among the collaborators by social consensus rather than by technical means. Commenting function. We have evidence that email is substantially used for commenting, and direct comment on electronic documents with special format is also made in some cases. Considering this fact, we would like to discuss two approaches to make comment support more usable. First, a clear understanding of how and why email is used for commenting in practice is requested. What advantages are there in using email? In what context do people comment by email? What kinds of comments do writers make via email? Answers to these questions would give designers better guidelines to design commenting functions which reflect or resemble the properties of email, or to integrate a writing tool with an email system. Second, it remains to be studied how to design better interface for commenting functions which currently lack in usability. Commenting with special format found in four cases is a direct way of commenting, i.e., executing only one action, while

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commenting by a commenting function requires more than two actions such as placing the cursor at the position where they make a comment, moving to the tool bar, and selecting the commenting function in succession. Certainly, commenting functions demand users’ cognitive load to manipulate them more than commenting directly with special format. Therefore, we believe that the design of a more direct way of commenting is desirable. Different types of interface can also be considered. According to Wojahn et al. (1998), there are three interface variants widely used: split-screen, interlinear, and aligned interfaces. Each interface affects commenting practices differently. For example, Wojahn et al. found that people in the interlinear or aligned conditions communicated more often about problems of the text and invalid comments than the split-screen condition. Generally, however, little research on the usability of these alternative interfaces has been done. Maintenance of revision history. According to our data, writers tend to store several previous versions mainly for keeping individual resources as repository for reusable parts of the document. Concerning this fact, one might think that only one current version should be shared in a public space, while other previous and alternative versions are maintained by each individual on his or her private space. However, a drawback of this solution is that writers may experience inconvenience caused by additional cognitive load when shifting from the public space to the private space, or vice versa. Thus, a better way is to design a co-authoring tool to help writers store and access freely previous versions as well as the current version on the same public space. In this case, it is also important to make users distinguish the current version from other ones. Change representation. There have been only a few studies on the design of change representation functions (e.g., Neuwirth et al., 1992). Acknowledging that more research on it must be undertaken, we want to address briefly three important issues: what changes should be preserved, how to present those changes, and how to support writers’ tracking of changes. First, the matter of what to present may be more complex than we think: Does the system have to record all deleted parts of the document? Might it be necessary to permit the writers to decide the level of representation of deleted parts? What about filtering out trivial changes automatically like typing error corrections? Generally, preserving only the parts of a writing process that may be useful later on is not a trivial design task. In our previous study, filtering out keying error corrections in a writing analysis tool, Trace-it (Severinson Eklundh and Kollberg, 1996), was perceived helpful to analyze cognitive processes of individual writing by reducing writers’ unintended keying errors (Kim, 1996). However, we feel that more empirical work is still required to capture a fuller understanding of what changes to preserve to facilitate the reviewing process within a group of writers. With respect to the issue of how to represent changes, some systems such as MS Word and FrameMaker display both deleted and inserted parts with strikethroughs


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and underlines respectively, and/or a bar indicating changed parts in the margin of the document. In another systems like ‘Prep’, the changes may be maintained and displayed in a separate column space (Neuwirth et al., 1992). It is of interest to investigate for what contexts each way of presenting changes is suitable. Tracking revisions is needed when users want to recover previously deleted parts or to reduce revisions which are not needed any more. One way of navigating through changes is to trace each revision according to the spatial order where it is located in the document, e.g., in MS Word. The other is to do it by the temporal order in which it was made, e.g., in ‘Trace-it’ and in the notion of global undo (Abowd and Dix, 1992). When users do not know where a part was deleted in the text but knows when it was done, tracing by the temporal order is better. In the reverse case, however, the way of tracing in MSWord is more useful. Therefore, designers must consider when each way of tracing revisions can be used and what merits and demerits it has. If possible, it is desirable to support both ways. Need for good network-centric user interfaces. It is important not to underestimate the value of network environments underlying the design considerations described here. Developers of collaborative writing tools should consider requirements of network architecture such as simplicity in designing and maintaining it, accessibility to the application by any users, concurrency control, and so on (Brinck et al., 1993). Aspects of interfaces associated with the network environment as well as currently available functions are becoming more important. In his paper “Goodbye, GUI . . . Hello, NUI (Network-centric user interfaces)”, Halfhill has advocated the importance of NUI to PCs as well as to network computers (Halfhill, 1997). From users’ point of view, good user interfaces for sharing documents in a network environment are crucial. For example, mechanisms of access to shared documents and of user registration for them should not be complicated. Change of level of access to those documents should be easy. Proper feedback to users’ actions such as saving a changed document and registering a new user with some access restriction might be helpful, since many users hesitate using a public space, wondering if their actions are really working, or if unintended results of those actions may prove fatal to other users. While writers can freely handle documents on their own local resources, they must generally be cautious before executing a task on a network environment. Thus, user interfaces on a network should be designed to reduce users’ hesitance of performing the actions and their fear of unintended results of their actions. Further, good support for awareness of other members’ activities and various kinds of information related to the document can be very helpful. There has been little research on usability of functions concerning network environment, and on work practices of users in it. However, when we have a better network infrastructure, we believe that reviewing tools to support change representation, annotations, and the like, will eventually be more useful.

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6. Conclusion This work has hopefully shed some light on reviewing practices which may be applied in the design of collaborative writing tools. We also hope that our emphasis on common reviewing practices will help designers conceptualize reviewing practices without being overwhelmed by difficult and complicated aspects of collaborative writing. While recognizing that those aspects are equally important, we believe that they will be gradually resolved in the process of evolution of writing tools.

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