A Pilot Study of CZTalk: A Graphical Tool for Collaborative Knowledge Work

Research in face-to-face communication has identified a variety of largely unconscious patterns of behavior that are used by collaborators to coordinate their conversation, build common ground, and repair errors of understanding. These provide a communication metachannel that is not explicitly supported in current collaboration environments. Without this metachannel, conversants must overburden linguistic channels with explicit communication strategies and codified behaviours e.g. "netiquette". One approach to solving this problem is to attempt to reproduce face-to-face collaboration with VR, video, etc. We have taken an alternative approach, using visualization techniques to create a graphical network representation of patterns of reference in collaborative discourse. A preliminary user study suggested that the CZTalk proof-of-concept prototype provided improvements in both interpretation and authorship.