User 1: Academic Media Analyst

Godfrey has been lightly using JiTR to pull media reports on coffee growers in Costa Rica. For now, Godfrey prefers the system for data collection, retention and organization. It is these things he thinks will benefit him in the long run, hoping to have, in the end, a comprehensive and easily explored collection of annotated notes. Using JiTR's Knowledge Manager, he has created a spider that searches through his common sources and fetches new stories. When a article come a in, he is notified via email. Logging in, he proceeds to read over the new item, adding his notes about the content and organizing it through relevant labels. Labeling has hit a note with Godfrey, because when he remembers to do it, he can easily browse through items that he needs at a particular time. Godfrey is beginning to warm to the system, and decides to add his older research to the repository, manually specifying its chronological place in the repository. Nevertheless, he still does not fully trust the web, and religiously exports offline backups of his repositories.

As he is preparing for a meeting with his colleagues, Godfrey chooses a selection of items compiled in the last few weeks and exports them to a single, easily-accessible page. He sends the link out prior to the meeting to provide background information. For the meeting, he prints a bibliography with his notes for each item. An alert appears, informing Godfrey that one of his articles is missing an author. He clicks the provided link, and a few seconds later, he has added the proper information for JiTR.

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NOTES: "For the meeting, he prints a bibliography with his notes for each item" : As Susan noted, 'bibliography' is not the right word here, as it suggests adding a complicated referencing tool. The intention was to have JiTR organize the metadata it knows (author, data, data accessed, title, url) in a familiar way.

Point-Form

First Encounter

• Godfrey gets a basic account created automatically for him.
• He creates a repository for "Coffee Research". (Image 1)
• He has some web pages of materials bookmarked so he tries adding them to his repository by using the Simple Acquire tool that, given a URL, will add the item.(Image 2)
• After adding dozen items he tries some of the analytical tools to see what they will do.
  • He tries the word cloud and list words. This suggests some ideas for keywords for his tags and he goes through and starts systematically tagging items by creating categories that he can check off.
  • He tries the cleaner and runs that on each item to see whether it leaves the text he wants. He finds he still ends up deleting text left after the cleaner to have only the key passages. He is satisfied that he can always retrieve the original version. (Images 3,4)
• Having done all this work he wants to see if he can save the materials to his hard drive. He doesn't trust web research environments so he exports his repository with the notes and tags. He is satisfied that he can keep the materials on his PC if something goes wrong with the repository. (Image 5)

Second Encounter

• Godfrey now wants to see what the more advanced tools do. He sets up a spider to start from his common source sites. (Image 1)
  • New items are automatically fetched
• Godfrey receives an email every day summarizing the new items spidered.
• After a week he decides to see what was retrieved and clean up the repository.
  • He reads each new item and decides whether to keep or discard it. With one click he can discard items. (Image 2)
  • If he keeps it he uses the automatic cleaner to remove the HTML (Image 2)
  • On the same page, he then gives items category labels (using categories developed before and adding some) (Image 2)
  • He adds a short note to the ones that are important. (Image 2, Image 3)
  • Godfrey also makes a point to add a readable label, because that helps him scan his list of items.
• he starts adding older research, for the organizational benefits (Image 4)
• Godfrey is now satisfied that this can help him and he again backs up his repository to a tagged text file he can consult. He chooses an HTML format so he can easily browse his items on his PC.

Third Encounter

• Godfrey wants to share his repository with a colleague at a meeting. He needs to first get old stuff in.
• He enters old items that he had in his files and which are not available on the web to acquire. Some he has to type and some he can copy from notes typed into his PC.
• To make a selection of items visible to his colleague he tries goes through the repository and marks important items as public. He notes the URL for the public items from this repository which he sends to his colleague.
• As a backup Godfrey also exports a single HTML page, but without his notes to e-mail his colleague
• For his meeting, he also prints out a report about the repository which summarizes how many items and includes his notes.
• At the meeting he and his colleague decide to collaborate and use the JiTR repository. Now Godfrey has to figure out how to give Jane access.

First Encounter

Second Encounter

New taxes on coffee trade in Costa Rica has growers setting up protests against the government, claiming that, if anything, they should be subsidized, not taxed. Godfrey start tagging articles on the topic with the term "Coffee Tax Conflict". In the notes for each article, Godfrey adds a small summary of the article and his analysis of its biases.

Before trying to analyze the bigger picture, Godfrey runs the "Count Words" process that JiTR offers to him through its TAPOR connection. Running the process on the "Coffee Tax Conflict" tag, organized by chronology, he is given bar graphs that show the frequency of each word throughout the larger collection. One thing in particular catches Godfrey's eye: while mentions of the president by name go down over time, the word "spokesperson" goes up. Also, the use of the word "tax" decreases. Godfrey forms a hypothesis as to the change in reporting over time, and skimming through the articles, confirms his guess. It appears that, over time, the media began to broaden their focus onto the larger issue of government confidence, and Godfrey suspects that less of an official voice from the government is what causes the media to stray from the primary issue. He writes this observation in the "Notes" section of the "Coffee Tax Conflict" tag, and a small icon appears beside the term in his tag list, reminding him that there is a note included.

Point-Form

Fourth Encounter

• Godfrey and Jane have been adding items manualy and continuing to run the spider.
• Godfrey finds a couple of sites that have a lot of materials so he uses a crawler to acquire the entire sites.
• Godfrey and Jane agree on a list of tag categories to help them manage the sub-issues. Jane goes through retagging the items. She finds she can use the bulk tagging tool to change tags and she can search the repository for keywords to suggest which items should be tagged a certain way.
• When he reads each new article, Godfrey adds pointer notes about it in the "Notes Section".
• Ability to run TAPOR Tools is useful when Godfrey runs "Count Words" on a chronological collection of a specific tag. This lets him see word use over time
• Notes are also allowed for a specific tag.

• Since notes can be added to entries, tags, and the collection at large, small icons are used to easily show when there is a note attached to something.