Paper Reading #11: Chronicle: Capture, Exploration, and Playback of Document Workflow Histories

Comments
Evin Schuchardt 
Paola Garza


Reference Information
Title: Chronicle: Capture, Exploration, and Playback of Document Workflow Histories
Authors: Tovi Grossman, Justin Matejka, George Fitzmaurice
When/Where: UIST 2010, New York, New York

Summary
This paper discussed Chronicle, a system that captures video history of a user's actions in a document, allowing the videos to be viewed and explored later. In particular, it was implemented for an image editing application. It records things such as settings that a user chooses and particular tools that the user uses, marking them in the video.Currently, many programs keep track of a user's past operations in order to allow undo operations to occur; however, many of these programs discard the information after a save. Chronicle keeps this information for the user or other users to view for reference later.

 It is suggested that this tool could be used for imitating someone else's work or for instructional purposes, when the user does not know how to accomplish a task that someone else has done previously. The system consists of the main Chronicle window, an interactive timeline, and the actual image editing application window. The videos can be played back in full-resolution, placed transparently on top of the application window, with slightly different colors, so that the user can see what operations are occurring in relevance to their current situation and still distinguish the video from their own work. As the user is working, videos are recorded in one-minute segments. Videos are presented as thumbnails organized into a hierarchy, each representing a revision and containing workflow information. The system provides probes and filters to help the user navigate through the videos. Annotations can even be added to videos, for use as a reminder or for teaching purposes.

A qualitative user study occurred with eight participants, each with previous image editing experience. They were asked to perform basic operations using Chronicle, and overall, the study reported very good results. While users said it was overwhelming to learn in a short amount of time, they thought it could be very useful and felt that it would not take long to master the program. The authors suggested adapting this system for other software domains.

An example of Chronicle. A is Chronicle's main window, B is Chronicle's timeline, and C is the image editing application window. Source: article.

Discussion
I thought this system was very interesting, since it expanded on a current system (saving past records) in a way to help improve human memory and education. While I do not have much experience with image editing software, I can definitely see how something like this could be helpful. Even more so, since I would theoretically be able to use Chronicle to learn how to use such a system by following the motions of someone who does know what they are doing. The main problem that I see with this, though, is that the videos take up a large amount of memory to store. In the article, it stated that one two-hour video took 1.3Gb to store, and with multiple usages and videos, that could get very impractical. And even privacy issues could occur with this. What if someone created some new image they wanted to copyright, but someone else got ahold of their automatically-recorded work history? Then anyone could easily duplicate it.

Despite the downfalls, this was still a very interesting product. I would like to see what other applications besides image editing that it could be applied to. Maybe in programming environments, to help teach new programmers or to provide programmers with an older copy of code when they forgot to back it up?