´óÏó´«Ã½

Shauna Concannon, studying for her PhD in , has joined us for a few months looking at ways to navigate the World Service archive with our ABC-IP project team. Also in that project: Andrew's been learning Rails and ingesting data from the first user study into the database - this seed data has been a useful way of seeing the system come to life. Theo and Michael Smethurst met with Global Minds (M&A international panel) to co-ordinate our next user testing phase of the ABC tagging research: "They're being super helpful guiding us through what we need to do to run a successful experiment". Yves has been at WWW'12 all week where he did two presentations and one panel and promises "a massive blog post" when he returns.

Rob Cooper and the Snippets team have been finishing off their new Dynamic Transcript tool which allows users to navigate TV programmes using a formatted version of the subtitle files. Their work has been focused on three areas: speed, readability and ease-of-use. They're planning to have it live next week so internal ´óÏó´«Ã½ users can try it out and give feedback.

A screenshot of Snippets in action.

Chris Lowis has been continuing work on the W3C Audio Project, concentrating on the user interfaces for our prototypes. He's been developing some code to allow virtual knobs and switches to be controlled with the mouse. Helped by Andrew N, he's been using require.js to manage the applications' dependencies.

George has been at this week, demonstrating RadioTAG on the RadioDNS stand.

I wasn't there for the show and tell this week but Tristan reports:

"We had a great team demo session; Chris Newell showed his client-side recommender, very fast. Snippets showed their transcript tool which synchronises a scrolling display of text with the video, and lets you navigate by video or text. Matt P demo'd his ring modulator. Chris L showed the Pete Warren-designed control panel for his wobulator, and an entertaining bit of interactive sports graphics (which we can't share, sorry!)."

Congratulations to Joanne on submitting her master's dissertation (blog post version coming soon).

Finally, links -

from Theo, who went to the . "My first time at one of these events. Very interesting - a couple of printer projects and an electricity consumption prototype. Gets the brain whirring. Highly recommend it."

via Yves: (pdf) "Complex stories spaghetti into branches, side stories, and intertwining narratives. In order to explore these stories, one needs a map to navigate unfamiliar territory. We propose a methodology for creating structured summaries of information, which we call metro maps. Our proposed algorithm generates a concise structured set of documents which maximizes coverage of salient pieces of information. Most importantly, metro maps explicitly show the relations among retrieved pieces in a way that captures story development."

And one via Kat: