Selfsourcing Example: Presentation Creation

In addition to playing around with the selfsourcing of photo organization, I am also building a desktop selfsourcing application to support brainstorming and create a presentation with the results. A slide from a selfsourced presentation (on the topic of selfsourcing) is shown above.

Brainstorm-based presentations are created in three phases:

Idea Generation: During the brainstorming phase a user is asked to enter short fragments of ideas on a topic. The user is also prompted with previously entered ideas and asked to riff on them. For example, the selfsourcing presentation above was created using 48 un-prompted ideas and 148 ideas inspired by the initial 48.

Idea Organization: Once a set of ideas has been collected, these are organized using a modification of the Cascade taxonomy creation. The user takes up to three passes to tag each idea, adding one or more tag at a time. A third is pass used only if the tags for the first and second pass do not match. This resulted in 61 unique tags for the slide example shown above. Uncommon tags are automatically removed, and tags that are highly correlated are suggested to the user to merge.

Presentation Creation: Finally, the tagged ideas are used to automatically create a presentation. Individual slides are constructed iteratively. The tag with the fewest ideas associated with it is used as the slide header, and the associated ideas make up the bullet points. Since ideas can have multiple tags, subgroups within a slide are made using auxiliary tags. The ideas included in the slide are then removed from the general pool, and the tag with the next fewest number of ideas is considered. This ensures that individual slides do not contain too many ideas. Slides are ordered so that those associated with tags that cover the most ideas appear first. These slides only contain the ideas that remain associated with the tag after the ideas related to other tags are removed, and tend to address the big concepts that emerged from brainstorming. The user then copyedits slides and performs local reorganization.

Related paper:
J. Teevan, D.J. Liebling, and W. Lasecki. Selfsourcing Personal Tasks. CHI 2014 WiP.