Developing and Evaluating Digital Creativity Support in Google Docs for Journalists

Although journalism is classified as one of the creative industries, there is little bespoke digital support for creative thinking by journalists. To fill the gap, this paper reports new research that led to the implementation and first evaluation of JUICE, a new digital prototype to support creative thinking by journalists during the early development of news stories. Emerging from a user-centred design process, JUICE is implemented as a simple Add-on Sidebar and Dialog Box in Google Docs that a journalist can invoke when developing news stories. Interviews with experi-enced journalists were used to elicit 6 strategies that JUICE uses to guide its users to generate dif-ferent angles on news stories using creative information searches and interactive creativity sup-port. In this paper we describe the information search algorithm and new interactive support to create news stories with one of these strategies – the individual human angle on the story – then report a first evaluation of JUICE implemented with the algorithm and support during its use by journalism students. Results revealed that most of these student journalists were able use JUICE to generate new news stories with individual human angles in a short period of time, but still used established web search tools to collect more detailed information about the angle in order to write the story. Journalist feedback was used to improve the usability of JUICE and design new interac-tive features.

Content

Author and article information

Contributors

Neil Maiden

Konstantinos Zachos

James Lockerbie

George Brock

Christopher Traver

Conference

Publication date: July 2016

Publication date (Print): July 2016

Pages: 1-12

Affiliations

[0001]City University London Cass Business School, London

[0002]Department of Journalism City University London

[0003]Cornell University Information Science Department, Ithaca NY

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/HCI2016.23

SO-VID: 51b6f5bd-90bb-47f7-beab-eb989ac8efa1

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Proceedings of the 30th International BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference

Conference acronym: HCI

Conference number: 30

Conference location: Bournemouth University, Poole, UK

Conference date: 11 - 15 July 2016

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Fusion

History

Product

1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/HCI2016.23

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

REFERENCES

S.F. AlaouiT. SchiphorstS. CuykendallK. CarlsonK. StuddK. Bradley 2015 Strategies for Embodied Design: The Value and Challenges of Observing Movement Proc. 10th ACM Conf. Creativity and Cognition 121 130 ACM Press
Alchemy API 2016 Using AlchemyAPI for Enterprise-Grade Text Analysis Retrieved at http://resources.alchemyapi.com/white-papers/using-alchemyapi-for-enterprise-grade-text-analysis
API 2011 What is journalism? https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/journalism-essentials/what-is-journalism/ Retrieved 8 March 2016
C.R. AragonS.S. PoonA.D. Aragon 2009 A Tale of Two Online Communities: Fostering Collaboration and Creativity in Scientists and Children’ Proc. 7th ACM Conf. on Creativity and Cognition 9 18 ACM Press
T. BartindaleE. ValentineM. GlancyD. KirkP. WrightP. Olivier 2013 Facilitating TV Production Using StoryCrate Proc. 9^th ACM Conf. Creativity and Cognition 193 202 ACM Press
M. BaasC.K.W. De DreuB.A Nijstad 2008 A Meta-Analysis of 25 years of Mood-Creativity Research: Hedonic Tone, Activation, or Regulatory Focus? Psychological Bulletin 134 779 806
E. Brill 1992 A simple rule-based part of speech tagger Proc., 3rd Conf. on Applied Natural Language Processing, ACL Trento, Italy
A. Currah 2009 What’s Happening To Our News? Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism Oxford
B. EkdaleJ.B. SingerM. TullyS. Harmsen 2015 Making Change: Diffusion of Technological, Relational, and Cultural Innovation in the Newsroom Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 92 4 938 958
S.L. Greene 2002 Characteristics of Applications that Support Creativity Communications of ACM 45 10 100 104 ACM Press
A. JainN. KupferY. QuR. LinderA. KerneS.M. Smith 2015 Evaluating TweetBubble with Ideation Metrics of Exploratory Browsing Proc. 10th ACM Conf. on Creativity and Cognition 53 62 ACM Press
B. HollisN.A.M. Maiden 2013 Extending Agile Processes with Creativity Techniques IEEE Software 30 5 78 84
M. HonauerE. Hornecker 2015 Challenges for Creating and Staging Interactive Costumes for the Theatre Stage. Proc. 10th ACM Conf. on Creativity and Cognition 13 22 ACM Press
A. KerneE. KohM. Smith S.A. WebbB. Dworaczyk 2008 combinFormation: Mixed-Initiative Composition of Image and Text Surrogates Promotes Information Discovery. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 27 1 1 45
M. MachillM. Beiler 2009 The Importance of the Internet for Journalistic Research: A MultiMethod Study of the Research Performed by Journalists Working for Daily Newspapers, Radio, Television and Online Jour-nalism Studies 10 2 178 203
M.L. MaherD. FisherK. Brady 2013 Computational Models of Surprise as a Mechanism for Evaluating Creative Design. Proc. 3^rd International Conf. on Computational Creativity Sydney June 2013 147 151
D. McCarthyR. KoelingJ. WeedsJ. Carroll 2004 Using Automatically Acquired Predominant Senses for Word Sense Disambiguation, Proc. ACL 2004 Senseval-3 Workshop Barcelona, Spain
A. MinardM. SperanzaE. AgirreI. AldabeM. van ErpB. MagniniG RigauR. Urizar 2015 SemEval-2015 Task 4: timeline: cross-document event ordering. Proc. 9th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation Denver, Colorado 2015 778 786
N. MonfortPerezR. PerezD. Fox HarrellA. Campana 2013 Slant: A Blackboard System to Generate Plot, Figuration, and Narrative Discourse Aspects of Stories Proc. 3^rd International Conference on Computational Creativity Sydney Australia June 2013 168 175
T. SchofieldJ. VinesT. HighamE. CarterM. AtkenA. Golding 2013 Trigger Shift: Participatory Design of an Augmented Theatrical Performance with Young People, Proc. 9^th ACM Conf. Creativity and Cognition 203 212 ACM Press
T. Simpson 2005 Wordnet.net.open-source.ebswift.com/WordNet.Net
H. Sjøvaag 2014 Homogenisation or Differentiation? The Effects of Consolidation in the Regional Newspaper Market Journalism Studies 15 5 511 521
R. J. Sternberg 1999 Handbook of Creativity New York Cambridge University Press
M. StevensonY Wilks 2001 The Interaction of Knowledge Sources in Word Sense Disambiguation. Computational Linguistics 27 3 321 349
T. WitschgeG. Nygren 2009 Journalism: a profession under pressure? Journal of Media Business Studies 6 1 37 59
A. WuJ.B. YimE. CasparyA. MazalekS. ChandrasekharanN.J. Nersessian 2011 Kinesthetic Pathways: A Tabletop Visualization to Support Discovery in Systems Biology. Proc. 8th ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition 21 30 ACM Press
K. ZachosN.A.M. Maiden 2008 Inventing Requirements from Software: An Empirical Investigation with Web Services. Proc. 16th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering 145 154 IEEE Computer Society Press
K. ZachosN.A.M. MaidenK. PittsS. JonesI. TurnerM. RoseK. PudneyJ. MacManus 2013 A Software App to Support Creativity in Dementia Care. Proc. 9th ACM Creativity and Cognition Conference 124 131 ACM Press
K. ZachosN. MaidenS. LevisK. CamargoG. Alle-mandi 2015 Creativity Support to Improve Health-and-Safety in Manufacturing Plants: Demonstrating Everyday Creativity. Proc. 10th ACM Conf. on Creativity and Cognition 225 234 ACM Press

Comments

Comment on this article

[1] S.F. AlaouiT. SchiphorstS. CuykendallK. CarlsonK. StuddK. Bradley 2015 Strategies for Embodied Design: The Value and Challenges of Observing Movement Proc. 10th ACM Conf. Creativity and Cognition 121 130 ACM Press

[2] Alchemy API 2016 Using AlchemyAPI for Enterprise-Grade Text Analysis Retrieved at http://resources.alchemyapi.com/white-papers/using-alchemyapi-for-enterprise-grade-text-analysis

[3] API 2011 What is journalism? https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/journalism-essentials/what-is-journalism/ Retrieved 8 March 2016

[4] C.R. AragonS.S. PoonA.D. Aragon 2009 A Tale of Two Online Communities: Fostering Collaboration and Creativity in Scientists and Children’ Proc. 7th ACM Conf. on Creativity and Cognition 9 18 ACM Press

[5] T. BartindaleE. ValentineM. GlancyD. KirkP. WrightP. Olivier 2013 Facilitating TV Production Using StoryCrate Proc. 9^th ACM Conf. Creativity and Cognition 193 202 ACM Press

[6] M. BaasC.K.W. De DreuB.A Nijstad 2008 A Meta-Analysis of 25 years of Mood-Creativity Research: Hedonic Tone, Activation, or Regulatory Focus? Psychological Bulletin 134 779 806

[7] E. Brill 1992 A simple rule-based part of speech tagger Proc., 3rd Conf. on Applied Natural Language Processing, ACL Trento, Italy

[8] A. Currah 2009 What’s Happening To Our News? Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism Oxford

[9] B. EkdaleJ.B. SingerM. TullyS. Harmsen 2015 Making Change: Diffusion of Technological, Relational, and Cultural Innovation in the Newsroom Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 92 4 938 958

[10] S.L. Greene 2002 Characteristics of Applications that Support Creativity Communications of ACM 45 10 100 104 ACM Press

[11] A. JainN. KupferY. QuR. LinderA. KerneS.M. Smith 2015 Evaluating TweetBubble with Ideation Metrics of Exploratory Browsing Proc. 10th ACM Conf. on Creativity and Cognition 53 62 ACM Press

[12] B. HollisN.A.M. Maiden 2013 Extending Agile Processes with Creativity Techniques IEEE Software 30 5 78 84

[13] M. HonauerE. Hornecker 2015 Challenges for Creating and Staging Interactive Costumes for the Theatre Stage. Proc. 10th ACM Conf. on Creativity and Cognition 13 22 ACM Press

[14] A. KerneE. KohM. Smith S.A. WebbB. Dworaczyk 2008 combinFormation: Mixed-Initiative Composition of Image and Text Surrogates Promotes Information Discovery. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 27 1 1 45

[15] M. MachillM. Beiler 2009 The Importance of the Internet for Journalistic Research: A MultiMethod Study of the Research Performed by Journalists Working for Daily Newspapers, Radio, Television and Online Jour-nalism Studies 10 2 178 203

[16] M.L. MaherD. FisherK. Brady 2013 Computational Models of Surprise as a Mechanism for Evaluating Creative Design. Proc. 3^rd International Conf. on Computational Creativity Sydney June 2013 147 151

[17] D. McCarthyR. KoelingJ. WeedsJ. Carroll 2004 Using Automatically Acquired Predominant Senses for Word Sense Disambiguation, Proc. ACL 2004 Senseval-3 Workshop Barcelona, Spain

[18] A. MinardM. SperanzaE. AgirreI. AldabeM. van ErpB. MagniniG RigauR. Urizar 2015 SemEval-2015 Task 4: timeline: cross-document event ordering. Proc. 9th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation Denver, Colorado 2015 778 786

[19] N. MonfortPerezR. PerezD. Fox HarrellA. Campana 2013 Slant: A Blackboard System to Generate Plot, Figuration, and Narrative Discourse Aspects of Stories Proc. 3^rd International Conference on Computational Creativity Sydney Australia June 2013 168 175

[20] T. SchofieldJ. VinesT. HighamE. CarterM. AtkenA. Golding 2013 Trigger Shift: Participatory Design of an Augmented Theatrical Performance with Young People, Proc. 9^th ACM Conf. Creativity and Cognition 203 212 ACM Press

[21] T. Simpson 2005 Wordnet.net.open-source.ebswift.com/WordNet.Net

[22] H. Sjøvaag 2014 Homogenisation or Differentiation? The Effects of Consolidation in the Regional Newspaper Market Journalism Studies 15 5 511 521

[23] R. J. Sternberg 1999 Handbook of Creativity New York Cambridge University Press

[24] M. StevensonY Wilks 2001 The Interaction of Knowledge Sources in Word Sense Disambiguation. Computational Linguistics 27 3 321 349

[25] T. WitschgeG. Nygren 2009 Journalism: a profession under pressure? Journal of Media Business Studies 6 1 37 59

[26] A. WuJ.B. YimE. CasparyA. MazalekS. ChandrasekharanN.J. Nersessian 2011 Kinesthetic Pathways: A Tabletop Visualization to Support Discovery in Systems Biology. Proc. 8th ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition 21 30 ACM Press

[27] K. ZachosN.A.M. Maiden 2008 Inventing Requirements from Software: An Empirical Investigation with Web Services. Proc. 16th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering 145 154 IEEE Computer Society Press

[28] K. ZachosN.A.M. MaidenK. PittsS. JonesI. TurnerM. RoseK. PudneyJ. MacManus 2013 A Software App to Support Creativity in Dementia Care. Proc. 9th ACM Creativity and Cognition Conference 124 131 ACM Press

[29] K. ZachosN. MaidenS. LevisK. CamargoG. Alle-mandi 2015 Creativity Support to Improve Health-and-Safety in Manufacturing Plants: Demonstrating Everyday Creativity. Proc. 10th ACM Conf. on Creativity and Cognition 225 234 ACM Press

Celebrating 65 years of The Computer Journal - free-to-read perspectives - bcs.org/tcj65