Abstract
A property of general interest of real-time collaborative editors is delay. Delays exist between the execution of one user’s modification and the visibility of this modification to the other users. Such delays are in part fundamental to the network, as well as arising from the consistency maintenance algorithms and underlying architecture of collaborative editors. Existing quantitative research on collaborative document editing does not examine either concern for delay or the efficacy of compensatory strategies. We studied an artificial note taking task in French where we introduced simulated delay. We found out a general effect of delay on performance related to the ability to manage redundancy and errors across the document. We interpret this finding as a compromised ability to maintain awareness of team member activity, and a reversion to independent work. Measures of common ground in accompanying chat indicate that groups with less experienced team members attempt to compensate for the effect of delay. In contrast, more experienced groups do not adjust their communication in response to delay, and their performance remains sensitive to the delay manipulation.
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Notes
- 1.
The 12 min interview is available online at the following url: https://interstices.info/jcms/i_60795/calculer-dans-les-nuages.
- 2.
Reverso tool is available on-line at http://www.reverso.net/.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful for financial support of the USCoast Inria associate team, the Inria internships programme and the research program ANR-10-SEGI-010 and for sabbatical support from the Department of Psychology, Wright State University. The authors thank Vinh Quang Dang for his help on simulations with GoogleDocs.
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Ignat, CL., Oster, G., Fox, O., Shalin, V.L., Charoy, F. (2015). How Do User Groups Cope with Delay in Real-Time Collaborative Note Taking. In: Boulus-Rødje, N., Ellingsen, G., Bratteteig, T., Aanestad, M., Bjørn, P. (eds) ECSCW 2015: Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 19-23 September 2015, Oslo, Norway. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20499-4_12
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