| Markings have been used to communicate to people, in the form of markup annotations, and to communicate to computers, via a machine-understandable marking language, but these two uses have never been integrated. In order to investigate such an integration of these two uses of markings, we designed, implemented, and user tested a marking based collaborative text editing system termed MATE for Markup Annotator/Text Editor. This exploratory research can be applied to three areas: asynchronous collaborative writing, the visibility of markings, and interaction languages which can be understood by both people and computers. In addition to these research topics, we are also interested how each topic interacts with the others.;Through the design, implementation, and usability testing of MATE, many insights were made: (1) The properties of markings, visibility in particular, have not been fully exploited and allow marks to be used in many new ways. (2) Common interaction languages are very useful even when the computer can only understand a limited subset of the language. (3) Asynchronous collaborative writings can benefit in many ways from the integration of annotations and editing commands.;Rather than studying each research area in isolation, we concentrated on a specific application which enabled us to find new insights in each area from our knowledge of the other areas. |
