Sylvie Noel: Collaborative Writing

Collaborative Writing

Systems available on the Web; articles about writing, design and use of systems, the Web, collaborative work and groups; research labs; and my classification system for Web-based collaborative writing systems. See also my del.icio.us and citeulike pages (right column) for more hyperlinks.

WARNING: I no longer work in this area and therefore no longer update this page.

Collaborative Writing Systems Available on the Web

Bloki
System in beta testing. Seems aimed at supporting the creation of Web pages, singly or by a group. Can also be used for collaborative writing. Uses the Web as word processor

BSCW
"Basic Support for Cooperative Work". BSCW if for group work, not just collaborative writing. BSCW uses the Web as storage space.

Col-laboració
Not yet available to the public, but you can see what the system looks like. Since it is for annotating existing documents, it uses the Web as storage space.

CourseForum and ProjectForum
In the Wiki style, but for education (CourseForum) or work (ProjectForum).

CoWord
By the creators of REDUCE. Lets a group work synchronously on an MS Word document.

DocReview
Available for installing on Unix. You can read about DocReview here, test it, and get the instructions on how to download it. DocReview is specifically for annotating an existing document, not modifying it on the Web, so it uses the Web as storage space.

EquiText
Collaborative writing system using the Web as word processor.
PORTUGUESE ONLY.

EtherPad
Web-based synchronous collaborative writing system, without a sign-in procedure

Gobby
A synchronous shared editor, meant for programmers, it seems. Works on Windows, Mac, Linux and Unix. Looks like it's a peer-to-peer tool.

JotSpot
An application wiki, which can be used for group writing. Uses the Web as word processor

LiveDrive and Collaboration Manager for Word
"LiveDrive currently enables multiple users of Microsoft Word to work together on a single, centrally-held copy of any document." Commercially available. I haven't seen this at work but the description suggests that they use the Web as word processor model.

MoonEdit
A "multi-platform collaborative text editor". MoonEdit lets co-authors work on the same document at the same time over the Internet. Uses the Web as word processor.

Quick Doc Review
Available and free. Quick Topic is for collecting comments about an existing document, not editing it. It uses the Web as storage space. You can use their Web server or install their system on your server.

REDUCE
This collaborative writing system permits synchronous editing. Uses the Web as word processor.

SparrowWeb
Available for beta testing. This aims at supporting a community-shared Web space, rather than collaborative writing. Editing is done by small, incremental changes. Uses the Web as word processor.

SubEthaEdit
For people using Mac OS X. Yes, they exist! SubEthaEdit is aimed primarily at programmers, but can also be used for real-time group editing of documents. This is a peer-to-peer tool.

SynchroEdit
Available for alpha testing. A synchronous platform-free editing tool. Still being developed, so it's hard to tell right now where this is going. Uses the Web as word processor.

TellTable
Available now and free. TellTable must be installed on a Unix or Linux server. Although it uses a single-user word processor (OpenOffice), the application is opened in your web browser, so it uses the Web as word processor. Disclosure: I work on this project.

Textflow
Available now. Free for the basic version, pay for the advanced version. For asynchronous editing over the Web. Lets several people comment on a document while one person edits the document. Uses the Web as word processor.

ThinkFree
Available in beta format. ThinkFree is an online office suite with tools for editing text, spreadsheets and slide presentations. Apparently, it saves in the same format as Microsoft.

Web Collaborator
Available now, free if you use their server, paid if you want to install it on yours. Offers a discussion thread, a version history and an RSS feed. You can download the (HTML) document as a PDF file.

Wiki Wiki Web
There are numerous clones of Wiki Wiki Web, I won't list them all here. Wiki uses the Web as word processor.

Writely
Available for beta testing. A semi-synchronous editing tool that is platform-free, though it does require the latest browsers to work. I say "semi-synchronous" because it refreshes the screen every two minutes. You can upload a Word document, and save as Word (though some of the formatting is lost on the way). Uses the Web as a word processor

Infrastructure Systems for Collaborative Writing on the Web

There are also attempts to improve the infrastructure in order to facilitate collaborative writing on the Web.

PINAS: Platform for Interaction Naming and Storage
Not yet available? There are loads of references to articles concerning PINAS here.

WebDAV: Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning
WebDAV is available and already integrated in several browsers and servers. This site is for the WebDAV community.

Articles and Books

I don't update this section. You're probably better off looking through my CiteULike collection.

Writing

Sharples, M. (1996). An account of writing as creative design. In C.M. Levy et S. Ransdell (Eds.), The Science of Writing. Lawrence Erlbaum. Also available as Cognitive Science Research Paper 392, School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex. (Postscript Document, FTP connection)

Sharples, M. and Pemberton, L. (1988). Representing Writing: An Account of the Writing Process with Regard to the Writer's External Representations. Cognitive Science Research Paper 119, University of Sussex.

Surveys, Interviews

Beck, E. (1993). A survey of experiences of collaborative writing. In M. Sharples (Ed.), Computer Supported Collaborative Writing, London: Springer-Verlag, chapter 6, pp. 87-112.

Ede, L. and Lunsford, A. (1990). Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Kim, E. and Severinson Eklundh, K. (1998). How Academics Co-ordinate their Documentation Work and Communicate about Reviewing in Collaborative Writing. Report TRITA-NA-P9815, IPLab-151. KTH-Sweden.

Posner, I.R. and Baecker, R.M. (1993). How people write together. In R.M. Baecker (Ed.), Readings in Groupware and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: Assisting Human-Human Collaboration.San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufman, pp. 239-250.

Collaborative Writing System Design

Baecker, R., Nastos, D., Posner, I., and Mawby, K. (1993). The user-centred iterative design of collaborative writing software. Proceedings of InterCHI'93, Amsterdam, Holland, 24-29 April, 399-405.

Beck, E. and Bellotti, V. (1993). Informed opportunism as strategy: Supporting coordination in distributed collaborative writing. Proceedings of ECSCW'93. London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 233-248.

Berggren, U. (1999). Design of Co-Writing Tools from a User Perspective. Report # TRITA-NA-P9801, IPLab-141. Department of Numerical Analysis and Computing Science. Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden.

Dourish, P. and Bellotti, V. (1992). Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces. Proceedings of CSCW'92, ACM, 197-214. (Acrobat Document)

Ellis, C., Gibbs, S. and Rein, G. (1990). Design and use of a group editor. In Cockton (Ed.), Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction. North-Holland.

Kim, E. and Severinson Eklundh, K. (2000). Change Representation in Collaborative Writing. Report # TRITA-NA-P0005, IPLab-170. Department of Numerical Analysis and Computing Science, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden.

Kraut, R.E., Galegher, J. Fish, R.S. and Chalfonte, B.L. (1992). Task requirements and media choice in collaborative writing. Human-Computer Interaction, 7, 375-407.

Mendoza-Chapa, S., Romero-Salcedo, M., and Oktaba, H. (October, 2000). Group awareness support in collaborative writing systems. Proceedings CRIWG-2000, 6th CYTED-RITOS International Workshop on Groupware, Madeira, Portugal, pp. 112-118.

Moran, A.L., Favela, J., Martinez, A.M., and Decouchant, D. (September, 2001). Document presence notification services for collaborative writing. Proceedings CRIWG-2001, 7th International Workshop on Groupware, IEEE Computer Society, Darmstadt, Germany, pp. 12-133.

Newman, J., and Newman, R. (1992). Three modes of collaborative authoring. In P.O. Holt and N. Williams (Eds.), Computers and Writing: State of the Art. Oxford: Intellect Books. Chapter 2, pp. 20-28.

Neuwirth, C.M., Kaufer, D.S., Chandhok, R., and Morris, J.H. (1993). Issues in the design of computer support for co-authoring and commenting. In R.M. Baecker (Ed.), Readings in Groupware and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: Assisting Human-Human Collaboration. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufman, pp. 537-549.

Neuwirth, C., Chandhok, R., Kaufer, D., Erion, P., Morris, J. and Miller, D. (October-November, 1992). Flexible diff-ing in a collaborative writing system. In J. Turner and R. Kraut (Eds), CSCW'92, Proceedings of the conference of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. Toronto, Canada. New York: ACM, 147-154.

Sasse, M., Handley, M. and Chuang, S. (1993). Support for collaborative authoring via email: the MESSIE environment. in G. De Michelis, C. Simone and K. Schmidt (Éds.), ECSCW'93, Proceedings of the European Conference of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Milan, Italy. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 249-264.

Sharples, M. (1993). Adding a little structure to collaborative writing. In D. Diaper and C. Sanger (Éds.), CSCW in Practice: An Introduction and Case Studies. London: Springer-Verlag. Chapter 5, pp. 51-67.

Sharples, M., Goodlet, J.S., Beck, E.E., Wood, C.C., Easterbrook, S.M. and Plowman, L. (1993). Research issues in the study of computer supported collaborative writing. In M. Sharples (Éd.), Computer Supported Collaborative Writing. Springer-Verlag. 9-28.

Sharples, M., Goodlet, J., Beck, E., Wood, C.C., Easterbrook, S., Plowman, L. and Evans, W. (1991). A framework for the study of computer supported collaborative writing. Cognitive Science Research Paper 190. School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex.

Sjoerd, M. (1995). Computer-Supported Collaborative Writing. Extract from Co-Writing, Look and Feel! Unpublished Master's Thesis, Information Technology and Management, Tilburg University.

Sun, C. and Ellis, C. (November, 1998). Operational transformation in real-time group editors: Issues, algorithms, and achievements. Proceedings of 1998 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Seattle, USA, pp. 59-68.

Sun, C., Jia, X., Zhang, Y., Yang, Y. and Chen, D. (1998). Achieving convergence, causality preservation, and intention preservation in real-time cooperative editing systems. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 5 (1), pp. 63-108.

Tammaro, S.G., Mosier, J.N., Goodwin, N.C. and Spitz, G. (1997). Collaborative writing is hard to support: A field study of collaborative writing. Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing, 6, 19-51.

Yang, Y., Sun, C., Zhang, Y. and Jia, X. (2000). Real-time cooperative editing on the Internet. IEEE Internet Computing, May-June, pp. 18-25.

Collaborative Writing Systems Descriptions

Adkins, M., Reinig, J.Q., Kruse, J. and Mittleman, D. (1999). GSS collaboration in document development: Using GroupWriter to improve the process. Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. (Acrobat Document)

Baecker, R.M., Glass, G., Mitchell, A. and Posner, I.R. (1994). SASSE: The collaborative editor. Transcription of a video presented at 1994 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Cerratto, T. (1999). Supporting collaborative writing and its cognitive tools. Third International Cognitive Technology Conference, CT'99.

Fish, R.S., Kraut, R.E., Leland, D.P. and Cohen, M. (March, 1988). Quilt - A collaborative tool for cooperative writing. Proceedings COIS'88 Office Information Systems. Palo Alto, CA.

Leland, M., Fish, R. and Kraut, R. (September, 1988). Collaborative document production using Quilt. Proceedings CSCW'88 Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Portland, OR

Mawby, K.L. (1991). Designing Collaborative Writing Tools. Unpublished Master's Thesis. Computer Science Department, University of Toronto.

Mitchell, A. (1996). Communication and Shared Understanding in Collaborative Writing. Unpublished Master's Thesis. Computer Science Department, University of Toronto.

Mitchell, A., Baecker, R. and Salaff, J. (1996). Communication and Control in a Shared Text Workspace.

Mitchell, A., Posner, I. and Baecker, R. (1995). Learning to write together using groupware. Proceedings of CHI'95.

Nastos, D. (1992). A Structured Environment for Collaborative Writing. Unpublished Master's Thesis. Computer Science Department, University of Toronto.

Web as Support for Collaborative Writing

Bentley, R., Horstmann, T. and Trevor, J. (1997). The World Wide Web as enabling technology for CSCW : The case of BSCW. CSCW : The Journal of Collaborative Computing, 6 (2-3), 111-134.

Cadiz, J.J., Gupta, A., and Grudin, J. (2000). Using Web annotations for asynchronous collaboration around documents. Proceedings of the ACM 2000 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Philadelphia, Penn., pp. 309-318. (MS Word document).

Chang, B.-W. (1998). In-place editing of Web pages: Sparrow community-shared documents. Seventh World Wide Web Conference, Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 30, pp. 489-498.

DE BRA, P. and AERTS, A. (February, 1996). Multi-user publishing in the Web: DreSS, A Document Repository Service Station. Proceedings of the ERCIM workshop on CSCW and the Web, Sankt Augustin, Germany.

Decouchant, D., Quint, V. and Salcedo, M.R. (1996). Structured cooperative authoring on the World Wide Web. World Wide Web Journal, 1 (1). Fourth International World Wide Web Conference Proceedings.

Decouchant, D., and Marinez-Enriquez, A.M. (April, 2000). A cooperative, deductive, and self-adaptive Web authoring environment. Proceedings MICAI-2000, Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Acapulco, Mexico, pp. 443-457.

Decouchant, D., Favela, J., Martinez-Enriquez, A.M. (January, 2001). PINAS: A middleware for Web distributed cooperative authoring. Proceedings SAINT 2001, The 2001 Symposium on Applications and the Internet, pp. 187-194, San Diego, CA.

Girgensohn, A. (1999). Supporting the writing of reports in a hierarchical organization. Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Work Activities Coordination and Collaboration, pp. 147-156. (Adobe Acrobat Document)

Grasso, A., Meunier, J-L, Pagani, D. and Pareschi, R. (1997). Distributed coordination and workflow on the World Wide Web. Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing, 6, 175-200.

Hendricken, C. (1999). Asynchronous collaboration by document review. Unpublished Web document.

Rizzi, C.B., Alonso, C.M.M.C., De Seixas, L.M.J., Costa, J.S., Tamusiunas, F.R., Da Rosa Martins, A. (May, 2000). Collaborative Writing via Web- EquiText. 7th Congreso Internacional de Informatica en Educacion, Haban, Cuba, 2000.

Rizzi, C.B., Alonso, C.M.M.C., Hassan, E.B., Tarouca, L.M.R., and de Seixas, L.M.J. (2000). EquiText: A helping tool in the elaboration of collaborative texts. Proceedings of SITE'2000 - 11th International Conference San Diego, CA.

Rodriguez, H. (2001). Using the WWW as infrastructure for collaborative production of documents. Unpublished Licentiate Dissertation, Royal Institute of Technology. Stockholm, Sweden.

Ruiz, D.C. and Favela, J. (September, 1998). Collaborative review and edition of HTML documents. 4th International Workshop on Groupware CRIWG'98. Rio de Janeiro, Brésil. (Zipped Document)

Vitali, F. and Durand, D.G. (December, 1995). Using versioning to support collaboration on the WWW. The Web Revolution: Fourth International World Wide Web Conference. Boston, MASS.

Whitehead, E.J. Jr., and Goland, Y.Y. (September, 1999). WebDAV: A network protocol for remote collaborative authoring on the Web. Proceedings Sixth European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Copenhagen, Denmark, pp. 291-310. (Adobe Acrobat Document)

Collaborative Work

Dix, A. (1997). Challenges for cooperative work on the Web: An analytical approach. Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing, 6, 135-156.

Grudin, J. (1992). Why CSCW applications fail: Problems in the design and evaluation of organisational interfaces. In D. Marca and G. Bock (Eds.), Groupware: Software for Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 552-560.

Udell, J. (2000). Internet Groupware for Scientific Collaboration. Advanced Computing Laboratory, Los Alamos, CA.

Groups

McGrath, J.E. and Hollingshead, A.B. (1994). Groups Interacting with Technology: Ideas, Evidence, Issues, and an Agenda. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.