Weaving Content with Coordination Widgets

Abstract

Text is a texture of interwoven threads that enable comprehension. Beyond the words themselves, conventions and structures, which we call coordination widgets, have been developed to support the reader's comprehension and navigation of text. These coordination widgets include Tables of Contents, Structured Abstracts, Reference Lists, and Footnotes. Although they are known to every reader, they are rarely considered as a group. The widgets depend on a high degree of structure in the text and are related to the structural descriptions of composite hypertexts. They also depend on the type of descriptive material that links to the text. We develop a framework for these widgets that builds on hypertext structure, discourse elements and genre theory. The framework both describes traditional widgets that have been developed to support paper-based publishing, and can be applied to environments for supporting interaction with electronic text. As eBooks and eReaders proliferate, the need grows for tools to support better navigation and comprehension of electronic text. Ultimately, the widgets, and the proposed framework, point the way to a new generation of publishing standards for interacting with multimedia and hypermedia environments.