Facilitating the reuse process in distributed collaboration: a distributed cognition approach

Facilitating the reuse process and enabling unanticipated reuse can improve efficiency of distributed collaboration. However, supporting the reuse process in complex and dynamic contexts, where future use of information is difficult to predict, is challenging. Collaborative analytics exemplifies such a context. We employed distributed cognition theory to design a collaborative visual analytics system, called AnalyticStream, for facilitating reuse of analysis outcomes. In contrast with the commonly used detail-oriented approach to applying distributed cognition, we performed a high level analysis of the design situation and we identified the cognitive processes that could be distributed over people to facilitate their collaboration. We examined some of the ideas derived from the theoretical analysis, by designing a simple reminding process through recommending relevant pieces of analysis, as well as a mechanism for attention management through allowing users greater control over their shared activity streams. A mixed-methods study of AnalyticStream showed that suggesting relevant artefacts facilitated discovering and consequently reusing them, and provided context-relevant awareness of other analysts' activities.