Web research (future scenario)

From BasKetUsabilityWiki

Scenario title: Albert is doing web research for a presentation

Albert has to hold a presentation about current research on black holes in a physics seminar in two weeks. His knowledge about the topic is only shallow, so he has to do some research as preparation. He creates a basket and names it "black hole research". While searching for literature via Google Scholar, CiteSeer and the website of his university's library, he drops links to interesting books into the basket. Often a BiBTeX entry is available on the scientific pages he visits. If this is the case, he drops the entry (possibly containing a DOI) into the basket via drag'n'drop and the whole bibliographic entry appears in the basket. He annotates the literature references so he still knows why he dropped them there later. If he later wants to know where he found the BiBTeX entry, he can look up where the BiBTeX entry was copied from. If there is no BiBTeX entry online, he can create an empty book reference and fill in the appropriate fields himself.

He also searches for overview articles which do not necessarily come as a scientific article, to get an overview about current black hole research. He reads into them a little bit and then decides to keep them or not. If he does, he copies the link into the basket to read it later.

If he finds a quote he thinks is good to mention in the presentation, he copies it into the basket right away, along with a reference (like a BiBTeX entry or just a book name and author). When he copies a part of a webpage, its source is also saved, so he can return to the original context at any time.

While reading and searching, a structure of the topic develops. So, if appropriate, Albert already groups literature references, articles and links and gives the groups titles. He links the aspects of the topic with lines, if two aspects belong together, or arrows, if one depends on the other. His topics eventually turn out to have three major aspects which can be worked on independently. If he zooms out, these groups of aspects can be clearly recognized.

By experience he knows that this structure is already a good start for the presentation structure. Every aspect of the topic will get its part of the time. After he is done with structuring and ordering, Albert zooms out of the basket to see the big picture. The basket is a comprehensible overview of his topic and he can start to work out the details now, further using the basket to collect more literature references and links. Albert also prints out a large hardcopy from time to time so he can see where he is at a glance.

[edit] Claims

	Albert can keep all associated information in one place.
	links can be annotated.
	This saves him a lot of work because he does not have to revisit the page to get correct citations later.
	BiBTeX entries can be used in BasKet and later dragged to other programs as well.
	single notes can be related to each other in multiple ways (grouping, arrows and lines)
	basket printouts can be used as an overview.