Abstract
The UNC Textlab/Collaboratory Project has developed a set of tools and techniques for recording and analyzing machine-recorded protocols of users while they work with an application system developed by our project — in the case described here, a hypertext-based writing environment, called WE. A tracking facility automatically records users' actions. Replay allows a researcher to recreate and view a user session in time proportional to the original, in uniform time, and in manually controlled steps Our grammar incorporates a cognitive model of the users' mental behaviors for the task of expository writing and parses protocols to produce parse trees that show users' strategies for working sessions. Finally, our display tools work with these data to produce static and animated representations from which researches can infer user strategies and patterns of behavior. In this paper, we discuss the tools we have developed and issues they raise. While this methodology is described with respect to a particular task and system, it is quite general and could be used for other systems and purposes. A brief conclusion outlines our current and future work, including our plans for a comprehensive protocol analysis environment that can be used by other researchers as well as our group and our plans to extend our tools and method to record, analyze, and display multiple protocol streams for groups of individuals working collaboratively.
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