The Collaborative Writing Project investigates the relationships between computers and how people write together. The focus has been on studying how networked computers could be used to support people writing together, and what impact this support has on the writing process. This research has followed a user-centred, iterative approach. A set of design requirements have been formulated and a taxonomy of collaborative writing was developed. The development of two iterations of a shared editor has been realized. The first prototype, SASE, supports synchronous writing and editing in both focused and peripherally aware collaborative modes from workstations linked over local area and wide area networks. The second prototype, SASSE (Synchronous Asynchronous Structured Shared Editor), also supports brainstorming, outlining, and document review, provides a rich set of views of document structure, content, and revision process, and allows asynchronous work on a document. Current research explores how the results of field experiments can be used to inform the next iteration of our shared editor, and how collaborative writing can be used as an integral part of the collaborative knowledge building process.

Ron Baecker Ann-Barbara Graff

Alex Mitchell Ilona Rott Posner

Please read the copyright notice.

	Posner, I.R., Mitchell, A., and Baecker, R.M. "Learning to Write Together Using Groupware." To appear in Rada, R. (Ed.), Computer Supported Cooperative Writing (in press).
	Mitchell, A., Posner, I.R., and Baecker, R.M. " Learning to Write Together Using Groupware." Proceedings of CHI'95, April 1995, pp. 288-295.
	Baecker, R.M., Nastos, D., Posner, I.R., and Mawby, K.L. "The User-Centred Iterative Design of Collaborative Writing Software." Proceedings of INTERCHI `93, pp. 399-405, 541.
	Posner, I.R., and Baecker, R.M. "How People Write Together." Proceedings of the 25th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Volume IV, January 7-10, 1992, pp. 127-138.
	Baecker, R.M., Glass, G., Mitchell, A., and Posner, I.R. " SASSE: the Collaborative Editor." 8 minute refereed video tape presented at the 1994 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 1994; also published in the SIGGRAPH Video Review, 1994.

See some images of the SASSE prototype collaborative editor...

Images from our current research...