Chronicle: Capture, Exploration, and Playback of Document Workflow Histories

(2010)

Abstract

We describe Chronicle, a new system that allows users to explore document workflow histories. Chronicle captures the entire video history of a graphical document, and provides links between the content and the relevant areas of the history.

Users can indicate specific content of interest, and see the workflows, tools, and settings needed to reproduce the associated results, or to better understand how it was constructed to allow for informed modification. Thus, by storing the rich information regarding the documents history workflow, Chronicle makes any working document a potentially powerful learning tool.

We outline some of the challenges surrounding the development of such a system, and then describe our implementation within an image editing application. A qualitative user study produced extremely encouraging results, as users unanimously found the system both useful and easy to use.