The goal of this project is to continue development of a "work in preparation" (PREP) editor to study collaborative writing relationships. The proposed work builds on previous work that resulted in design of a prototype editor that supports some important cognitive needs of social Interaction such as (1) the recognition of individual contributions to a collaboration and (2) the detection of change from one version to another. While the project continues to address further issues in supporting the cognitive needs of writers working together, the project also begins to work on supporting the social needs of writing groups,needs such as flexible sharing of partial products and managing parts of the writing task. For example, to support flexible sharing of partial products, the project defines a set of parameters that will allow users to control what they exchange (character, paragraph, column, document), when they exchange it (automatically, upon request) and the speed of exchange. The work on this front makes a theoretical and practical contribution to computer science. The work on supporting the cognitive needs of collaborative writers leads to embedding in text and graphic editors more general, coherent an consistent models for annotations. The work on supporting the social needs of collaborative writings groups leads to the development of new protocols for collaborative documents, modeled as distributed, disconnectable databases.
