MultiMedia Visual Information Seeking

To Elke Rundensteiner, my thesis chair and advisor, I cannot thank you enough for your advice and guidance and for your willingness to support me through the discovery process--you helped make the PhD journey more enjoyable while redefining the meaning of "edit" at the same time! To the rest of my thesis committee--Judy Olson, Atul Prakash, and Terry Weymouth-- thanks for all of your insightful feedback and words of encouragement.

Special thanks to those students who have worked with me along the way--most notably the members of the University of Michigan Database Group (Matthew, Woody, Viviane, Anisoara, Nauman, Amy, Lei, and Harumi) who listened and challenged me along the way; Pedro Marron who worked on porting MMVIS to Java; and Monal Sonecha who helped program the initial k-d tree used to evaluate query processing.

To friends from the First Presbyterian Church for fellowship and support, to my volleyball comrades who helped me release and relieve stress, to Project FLAME (Foreign Language Applications in the Multimedia Environment) buddies who always kept me busy but laughing (that's you Jo and G!), to the GGI executive branch (Iris!), home front, and best customer (TGO) for more smiles and laughter, to the Diner's Club for keeping me well fed, and especially to Jonski Farms for a place in the country to finish writing (and writing) this thesis--I appreciate you all and would not have made it without you!

To Ben Shneiderman and Christopher Ahlberg for inspiring us with dynamic queries and visual information seeking, to Edna Coffin and Jere Johnston for providing interesting and challenging diversions in end-user multimedia authoring at Project FLAME, and to those researchers both near and far who represent what this place called a university should really be--most notably, Mark Guzdial, Shelly Heller, John Laird, and Scott Roberts.

Last, but not least, the biggest personal thanks goes to my family. Thanks Mom, Dad, Jill, Kent, Mark, Grant, and Ross--I love you all. Believe it or not, the "two more years" is finally over!

A Time for Everything Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven-- A time to give birth, and a time to die; A time to plant, and a time to uproot what is planted. A time to kill, and a time to heal; A time to tear down, and a time to build up. A time to weep, and a time to laugh; A time to mourn, and a time to dance. A time to throw stones, and a time to gather stones; A time to embrace and a time to shun embracing. A time to search, and a time to give up as lost; A time to keep, and a time to throw away. A time to tear apart, and a time to sew together; A time to be silent, and a time to speak. A time to love, and a time to hate; A time for war, and a time for peace.

And now it's time for me to graduate--'ere by the grace of God, go I!

This work was supported in part by a University of Michigan Rackham Merit Fellowship and the user interface studies were supported in part by a Rackham Thesis Grant. Special thanks to Judy Olson for permission to use the CSCW data for my case study in Chapter 6.