combinFormation's mixed-initiative composition space enables system agents and humans to engage in processes of finding relevant information, and forming and authoring collections. Previously, the system was developed and utilized to support information discovery. The efficacy of the system for supporting creativity has been established in some contexts. We present combinFormation as a tool for browsing popular media and authoring personal collections. Yahoo Buzz is an popular media collection of top search queries, categorized into genres such as actors, music and sports. Existing interfaces limit the human participant to only viewing results of a single search at any given time. This paper presents a new system structure which interleaves multiple searches concurrently in a round-robin manner, enabling participants to concurrently explore and connect diverse result sets, which, in aggregate, may consist of hundreds of documents. The mixed-initiative composition space serves as a media interface for combining search results and authoring personal collections. Evaluation using the Buzz demonstrated participants ability to browse more diverse information using combinFormation than with a typical browser. They experienced browsing and authoring as easier and more entertaining. Results have implications for a broad range of use contexts in which combined views of the results of multiple searches need to be authored, including research scenarios, as well as popular media. Copyright 2007 ACM.
name of conference
Proceedings of the 15th ACM international conference on Multimedia
