This paper introduces the Memetic toolkit for recording the normally ephemeral interactions conducted via internet video conferencing, and making these navigable and manipulable in linear and non-linear ways. We introduce two complementary interaction visualizations: argumentation-based concept maps to elucidate the conceptual structure of the discourse using a visual language, and interactive event timelines generated from the meeting metadata. We discuss in detail the affordances of Memetic's tools, in particular the Compendium hypermedia mapping tool, and the Meeting Replay tool that renders the semantic navigation indices into the videoconference replays. Additionally, with respect to methodology and evaluation, we describe how we are engaging diverse end-user communities in the process of designing and deploying these tools.

Buckingham Shum, S., Slack, R., Daw, M., Juby, B., Rowley, A., Bachler, M., Mancini , C., Michaelides, D., Procter, R., De Roure, D., Chown, T., and Hewitt, T. (2006). Memetic: An Infrastructure for Meeting Memory. Proc. 7th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, Carry-le-Rouet, France, 9-12 May. [PrePrint: www.memetic-vre.net/publications/COOP2006_Memetic.pdf]

Technologies for collaboration have advanced significantly in the past ten years. Through tools such as the Access Grid (AG), it is now possible to conduct multi-site meetings involving large numbers of participants interacting using high quality and video and sharing data. Virtual Venues within the AG toolkit store data, documents, applications and services which can be accessed across multiple sites. These documents might include records of the meetings themselves. We discuss ways in which such records can be made navigable and re-usable so that collaborators can achieve a shared understanding of meetings’ work.

Slack, R., Buckingham Shum, S., Mancini, M. and Daw, M. (2006). Design issues for VREs: can richer records of meetings enhance collaboration? Workshop on Usability Research Challenges for Cyberinfrastructure and Tools, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Montréal, 22 April 2006. [PrePrint: www.memetic-vre.net/publications/CHI2006_Memetic.pdf]

Having developed gIBIS and QOC as Argumentation-based Design Rationale (DR) approaches in the late 1980s/mid-1990s, we report on the subsequent evolution of this DR paradigm. Our primary claim is that with robust hypermedia software being used by professionals in diverse contexts, representations of this sort are demonstrably both practical and useful to capture. The Compendium approach has maintained a strong emphasis on keeping the representational scheme as simple as possible to enable real time and asynchronous Conversational Modelling, an approach which extends Conklin’s Dialogue Modelling with IBIS-templates specialised for systematic modelling. We have evolved an approach to tackling the DR capture bottleneck through a combination of human facilitative skill, hypertext structure, modelling methods, and an open technical architecture to assist interoperability. We present examples to illustrate the applications this work has found, in particular, we report on new work which integrates argumentation-based DR with design meeting video records, to create DR in the form of video annotated with IBIS-based semantics, accessible through the widely available Access Grid collaboration environment.

Buckingham Shum, S., Selvin, A., Sierhuis, M., Conklin, J., Daw, M., Rowley, A., Juby, B., Michaelides, D., Slack, R., Bachler, M., Mancini, C., Procter, R., De Roure, D., Chown, T. and Hewitt, T. (2006). From gIBIS to Memetic: Evolving a Research Vision into a Practical Tool. In: Design Rationale: Problems and Progress, Workshop in conjunction with Second International Conference on Design Computing & Cognition (8-12 July, 2006), Eindhoven, Netherlands. [www.memetic-vre.net/publications/DCCDR2006_Memetic.pdf]

The JISC-funded Memetic project was designed as knowledge management and project memory support for teams meeting via the Access Grid environment (Buckingham Shum et al , 2006). This paper describes how these capabilities also enable it to serve as a novel distributed video analysis tool to support interaction analysis. Memetic technologies can be used to record, annotate and discuss sessions recorded within a flexible, visual hypermedia environment called Compendium. We propose that beyond the use originally conceived, the Memetic toolset could find wide ranging applications within social science for virtual ethnography and data analysis.

Buckingham Shum, S., Daw, M., Slack, R., Juby, B., Rowley, A., Bachler, M., Mancini, C., Michaelides, D., Procter, R., De Roure, D., Chown, T. and Hewitt, T. (2006). Memetic: From Meeting Memory to Virtual Ethnography & Distributed Video Analysis. Proc. 2 nd International Conference on e-Social Science (26-28 June), Manchester, UK. [www.memetic-vre.net/publications/ICeSS2006_Memetic.pdf]

This paper introduces the Memetic toolkit for recording meetings held over Internet-based video conferencing technologies, and making these navigable in linear and nonlinear ways. We introduce the tools and technologies that form the toolkit and discuss the semantics of the information they capture.

Michaelides, D., Buckingham Shum, S., Juby, B., Mancini, C., Slack, R., Bachler, M., Procter, R., Daw, M., Rowley, A., Chown, T., De Roure, D. and Hewitt, T. (2006). Memetic: Semantic Meeting Memory. 1st International Workshop on Semantic Technologies in Collaborative Applications, Manchester, UK. [www.memetic-vre.net/publications/Memetic_STICA2006.pdf]

The goal of the JISC-funded Memetic project is to create a suite of tools for meeting support in the context of Virtual Research Environments. The approach we are taking is to: Work with end-user partners in a participatory design methodology, to exemplify usercentred design of e-Science tools; Develop tools to record and replay all or selected video streams in an Access Grid meeting; Investigate the scope for automatically indexing the meeting timeline with potentially significant events (such as slide changes, visits to websites, progression through agenda items, or changes in speaker); Manually index other significant events which are too complex for automated detection by mainstream tools (such as the raising of arguments and making of decisions) through the use of hypermedia concept maps of interlinked ideas, argument and documents..

Daw, M., Bachler, M., Buckingham Shum, S., Chown, T., De Roure, D., Hewitt, T., Juby, B., Mancini, C., Michaelides, D., Procter, R., Rowley, A. and Slack, R.(2005). Meeting Memory Technologies Informing Collaboration. All Hands Meeting (19 - 22nd September) Nottingham, UK. [www.memetic-vre.net/publications/Memetic_AHM2005.pdf]

This technical note illustrates a number of uses of a hypermedia tool that serve various dimensions of individual PhD study, such as organizing notes, generating literature reviews, performing experiments, analyzing results, publishing and presenting materials, and collaborating with supervisors and colleagues.

Selvin, A.M. and Buckingham Shum, S.J. (2005). Hypermedia as a Productivity Tool for Doctoral Research. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia (Special Issue on Scholarly Hypermedia), 11 (1), 91-101. [PrePrint: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/publications/pdf/kmi-tr-05-8.pdf]