Hypertext Structure Research Articles

Computer-assisted conversation for nonvocal people using prestored texts

The challenges faced by people who are severely physically impaired and nonspeaking are demonstrated by the fact that, even with current technology, the word rates that they can achieve using current communication systems tend to range from two to ten words per min. We have been investigating ways in which prestored reusable texts might assist in improving the performance of such systems. Beginning with a study of the acceptability and effects of including prestored texts in a conversation, this investigation examined a series of methods of increasing complexity that had the system itself perform some of the cognitive and manipulative tasks required to locate suitable texts for a user to include in conversation. These methods have included logging conversational paths for potential reuse in future interactions, using a hypertext structure for storing and navigating through conversational texts, employing fuzzy information retrieval, and building a system based on scripts, plans, and goals. Seeing the possible conversation modes as occurring at varying levels of novelty, from predictable routines through reusable texts to uniquely created utterances, the most likely area for significant improvement then is in the storage and retrieval of large amounts of reusable text. Research needs to discover ways of making the retrieval process as effortless and efficient as possible to free the user to concentrate on the interaction itself.

THE NEW LITERACY?: THE CHALLENGES OF HYPERTEXTUAL DISCOURSE

This article outlines the impact of forms of communication technology on our understanding of the concepts ‘literacy’ and ‘literacies’. Particular attention is paid to the influence of the personal computer on modern forms of communication, and thus, by implication, on our definition of literacy. The unique quality of the hypertextual structure which underlies computer‐based communication challenges many traditionally‐accepted notions of the nature and structure of written communication. In this way, computer‐based hypertextual communication has profound implications for our definition of literacy itself. In the near future it will not be possible to define ‘literacy’ in terms other than those associated with computers, and, more particularly, the asynchronous, nonlinear nature of hypertextual design.

Human and Economic Factors Affecting the Acceptance of Electronic Journals by Readers

Human factors that influence the acceptability of electronic journals to users include the interface, the hypertext structure, the searching and browsing functionalities, and the speed of the network response. Economic factors that influence the progress of electronic journals include not only the level of prices charged, but also the pricing structures adopted. Three recent studies of the acceptance of electronic journals by users and other published work are considered. It is concluded that the continued provision of high-quality scholarly publications to readers in the electronic era will require that publishers provide the needed design quality at prices that are significantly lower than those charged today for printed journals.

Methods for evaluating the quality of hypertext links

We present two methods for evaluating automatically generated hypertext links. The first method is based on correlations between shortest paths in the hypertext structure and a semantic similarity measure. Experimental results with the first method show the degree to which the hypertext conversion process approximates semantic similarity. The semantic measure is in turn only an approximation of a user's internal model of the corpus. Therefore we propose a second evaluation method based on measuring user's performance using hypertext. Finally, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of computer versus human evaluation, respectively.

Information Filtering Using User‘s Context on Browsing in Hypertext

Browsing is one of the most popular ways to gather information in database with hypertext structure. In order to support a user to browse, modeling of the user‘s interests is one of the most important issues. Although there are several promising methods to infer the interests from the user‘s browsing behavior, they assume that the interests are consistent during the browsing. However, the user‘s interests are often strongly dependent on the local context of the browsing. This paper describes a method to model the user‘s shifting interests from the browsing history. An information filtering method using the model of the interests has been implemented. We call it ’context-sensitive filtering‘. The results of an experimental evaluation, by real users‘ browsing for an encyclopedia in CD-ROM format, are also reported.

Update on the STS Website

http://www.sts.org experienced more than 10,000 “hits” over the first 4 weeks since it was opened (but not promoted). At the recent meeting of The American Association for Thoracic Surgery in San Diego, more than 200 surgeons took advantage of the opportunity to experience a live Internet connection to the World Wide Web at the STS Website booth in the Exhibitors’ area. STS President Robert Replogle and members of the Internet Committee hosted an estimated 150 persons at two separate orientation and display meetings. The reactions of those who attended were uniformly positive, and the international interest was particularly impressive. STS Website Discussion Groups are already up and running, but separate areas will soon be created for specific topics of importance. Lung volume reduction surgery developments outpace the ability of written media to interpret and report them. The STS Website will post relevant materials immediately, offering surgeons the best possible window on this important topic. Position papers, opinion polls, documents outlining government and third-party reimbursement policies, and other materials will be available with unprecedented speed and variety. A focus on minimally invasive coronary artery bypass surgery is evolving rapidly as well. In a similar fashion, progress from the Database Subcommittee will soon be apparent. The open forum discussion of the website will continue. Unique educational content will soon be appearing as a result of initiation of the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) project. Recognized authorities in adult cardiac, congenital cardiac, and general thoracic surgery will identify fundamental and provocative questions and develop response discussions to them. The relationship beween the STS Website and The Annals of Thoracic Surgery will continue to mature as a cooperative relationship with its publisher, Elsevier Science Inc. The list of interesting and valuable links to other sources of learning materials of interest to cardiothoracic surgeons will continue to grow. The site will also offer links to general information on computer literacy, the World Wide Web, and how to author content. Netscape Navigator 2.0 is the recommended browser because of the rich feature set, wide and free availability (including links from the STS Website), support for both Windows and Macintosh platforms, and additional features through supplemental “Plugin” applications. Wide-ranging support for Netscape exists throughout the industry, and collaborative arrangements already exist with most companies providing Internet access. Computer users with current subscriptions to some of the proprietary internet providers such as America Online, Prodigy, and Compuserve will likely soon be able to use Netscape Navigator to take full advantage of the Internet in general and the STS Website in particular. Now that the website is a reality, Peter Greene and Dan Jacobsen have focused on its organization and function for the next few weeks. In contrast to the rather simple structure of hypertext documents and links that characterize most websites, the STS site has at its core a relational database structure. The materials that are resident on the STS server are themselves rather simple in comparison with most other sites, but the function of the database architecture is quite elegant and its advantages are considerable. The “look and feel” issues of pages and presentations can be standardized because the displays are actually marked up from database elements when requested. The HTML encoding is done “on the fly” from database field information. This means that a variety of submissions will have standard, structured submission forms and that the data will remain highly organized with a requirement for minimal maintenance. Posting news or information and submitting educational content will require less individual effort than word processing. There are clear security advantages, and there are particular benefits to STS members who are involved in this project as coordinators and contributors. Contact the STS Office for your membership number, log in, and update your personal information file. Once again, the STS Website is a resource for all cardiothoracic surgeons, and all are encouraged to gain Internet access, to take advantage of the unique advantages of this premiere initiative, and to join in making the project a success.

Learning Manuals

A hypertext structure is used to present the results of a diagnostic algorithm in the context of related knowledge, so that the human trouble-shooter can verify proposed hypotheses. Both minimum distance and neural network classification are used as diagnostic algorithms and compared in their performance and specific properties. The results of the minimum distance classification are transparent for the users whereas the neural network can be used to incrementally store past experience in compressed form. New cases enlarge the precision of future navigation support.

하이퍼텍스트 학습상황에서 메타인지,인지오류,인지오류 감지 및 하이퍼텍스트 구조가 저작체제 학습에 미치는 효과

하이퍼텍스트 학습상황에서 메타인지,인지오류,인지오류 감지 및 하이퍼텍스트 구조가 저작체제 학습에 미치는 효과

Do-it-yourself TMN applications by visual programming methods

The development of specialized telecommunications management network (TMN) applications using conventional programming languages requires enormous development resources. In this article a method is presented that enables any network operator to create customized applications utilizing visual programming techniques. The advanced script construction method outlined in this article represents a script in the operations system (OS) as a linked network of templates for individual network element (NE) commands/Q3 operations and NE responses similar to a hypertext structure employed for the navigation through multimedia documents. The scripts are created by using visual programming techniques. The craft can interactively influence script control flow during its execution. This creates a vast number of options for script construction and virtually eliminates the expensive design and development of specialized TMN applications. >

From text to hypertext: A post-hoc rationalisation of LaTeX2HTML

The conventional hypertext authoring framework compels authors to represent their material as an interconnected network of nodes and links. Apart from the difficulties that this alone entails, the situation with HTML is even more problematic since the author is also responsible for mapping the abstract network model onto the computer file system. This is likely to hinder the widespread adoption of HTML by information owners who are finding it difficult not only to create but also to maintain coherent documents with complex interconnection topologies. In this paper it is argued that familiar document forms such as books, manuals, articles, reports, etc., often contain sufficient structural and cross-referential cues with which to build a rich hypertextual structure. It is shown how this structure can be automatically extracted and then realised as a collection of HTML files which can be explored using generated navigation panels. The conversion process and the advantages of this approach are illustrated with interactive examples using the LaTeX2HTML converter. Other unique features of LaTeX2HTML — mathematical equations and “conditional text” — are also discussed. Allowing authors to work with familiar metaphors and tools without compromising the flexibility afforded to them by the target hypertext system and delivery mechanism is perhaps the main reason for the growing popularity of text to hypertext conversion tools.

Hypertext

Hypertext, an electronic communication medium in which information is structured and accessed according to the audience's needs and interests, is increasingly used in business and technical communication. That use may justify curricula expansion in the development of the ability to communicate in hypertext from specialty courses to a variety of business and technical courses, including the foundation course. This article provides a concise overview of hypertext for instructors who may be considering this expansion but who need to become more familiar with the medium. The basic information that is provided includes the definition, uses, and advantages of hypertext. In addition, the terminology, theoretical bases, and essential structure of hypertext are discussed. Of particular concern to business and technical communication instructors who may be considering adding hypertext to their courses are the problems that the medium presents. Discussion includes considerations of linguistic design, computer capabilities, and human performance. Finally, behaviors that business and technical communicators should exhibit to encourage the use of hypertext are presented.

Editor's Introduction

Editor’s Introduction John Unsworth This journal does not usually run editor’s introductions, but with this issue it enters a new phase of its existence, and that new phase deserves some comment. For more than three years, Postmodern Culture has been publishing peer-reviewed critical and creative work in a text-only format that accommodates electronic mail: we will continue to publish in that format, but beginning with this January, 1994 issue, we will also publish each new issue (and provide all back issues) through the World-Wide Web. Regular subscribers of the journal will also note that this is the first issue ever to be published late: unfortunately, producing two versions of each file and setting up templates for article and issue design proved more time-consuming than anticipated. That it came out at all is due in large part to the efforts of the guest editors, Scott Allen and Stephen Bernstein for the DeLillo cluster and Tan Lin for the poetry cluster—and no less to Jim English, the review editor, and the editorial staff, Jonathan Beasley, Chris Barrett, Amy Sexton, and Jason Haynes. What’s the Web? The World-Wide Web may already be familiar to some of our readers, since its use is growing faster even than the internet itself, but many others will not yet have discovered it and may welcome some background information. The World-Wide Web is a client-server system for providing integrated text, graphics, sound, and video over the internet. The most important feature of the Web, though, is its ability to link files to one another in a hypertextual structure: in fact, it has the capability of turning the entire internet into one hypertextual web. The Web has been around for a couple of years, making it older than gopher, the more well-known client-server program that currently underlies (for example) many campus- wide information systems. At the moment, Web traffic is growing much faster than gopher traffic—341,634% per year vs. a mere 997% per year, according to one estimate1 —but its relatively slow start was due in part to the lack of an adequate client program. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Champaign- Urbana, has filled that void with Mosaic, an excellent, free, mouse-oriented client for the Web. Mosaic clients are available for Macintosh, Windows, RS6000, DEC, and Sun computers (by anonymous ftp from ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu). The entry-level equipment for using these clients might be, for example, a 386 with a VGA monitor and an ethernet card— equipment that costs under $1000 at this point. In fact, the nature of one’s connection to the internet is more likely to be an obstacle than is the nature of one’s equipment: since using the Web involves transmitting sizable files (graphics, sound, etc.), the transmission speeds of an ethernet connection are required for satisfactory performance. It’s possible to cruise the Web over your modem, with an additional layer of SLIP software, but this is agonizingly slow and can be absurdly difficult to set up. Since June of 1993, the World-Wide Web has been growing at a rate faster than one new server a day. In June, there were 100 sites; in November, there were 270 sites; in December, there were 623 sites (according to Matthew Gray of MIT, author of the WWW Wanderer, a program that follows links from one server to another, to determine the extent of the web). These estimates are certain to be low, but they give an idea of the curve. At present, something on the order of a quarter of a million documents are provided over the Web; the increase in use of Web clients is on the order of 2000% a month. In other words, while it is not clear how well all this will scale up, it is clear that we’ll find out the answer to that question very soon. The Web has its shortcomings (for example, its hypertext pointers refer to literal file- and path-names, making it easy for someone on one system to set up a pointer to a file on another system...

Information retrieval from hypertext: An approach using plausible inference

This paper approaches the problem of information retrieval from hypertext. In this context, the retrieval process is regarded as a process of inference that can be carried out either by the user exploring the hypertext network, browsing, or by having the system exploit the hypertext network as a knowledge base, searching. In the following, a comprehensive model is proposed taking into account both of the perspectives, and combining effectively browsing and querying into a unified framework. Hypertext nodes are regarded as facts, links as rules, and the connected hypertext structure as an inference network that can be used to prove the query inferentially. Next, design and implementation issues are discussed concerning a prototype system developed to evaluate the proposed approach in terms of retrieval effectiveness and search efficiency.

Structural analysis of hypertexts

Hypertext users often suffer from the “lost in hyperspace” problem: disorientation from too many jumps while traversing a complex network. One solution to this problem is improved authoring to create more comprehensible structures. This paper proposes several authoring tools, based on hypertext structure analysis. In many hypertext systems authors are encouraged to create hierarchical structures, but when writing, the hierarchy is lost because of the inclusion of cross-reference links. The first part of this paper looks at ways of recovering lost hierarchies and finding new ones, offering authors different views of the same hypertext. The second part helps authors by identifying properties of the hypertext document. Multiple metrics are developed including compactness and stratum . Compactness indicates the intrinsic connectedness of the hypertext, and stratum reveals to what degree the hypertext is organized so that some nodes must be read before others. Several existing hypertexts are used to illustrate the benefits of each technique. The collection of techniques provides a multifaceted view of the hypertext, which should allow authors to reduce undesired structural complexity and create documents that readers can traverse more easily.

A three‐dimensional hypertext structure for referencing a housing discrimination library

Hypertext software is being used to link and reference documents stored in a library that will be used by civil rights housing discrimination investigators. The library is a part of an expert system which verifies the existence of housing discrimination. A method of organizing the hypertext files so as to prevent the user from becoming disoriented in the system is illustrated in this paper.

Practical electronics taught by hypertext: The workbench project

WORKBENCH, as suggested by the name, is a personal computer (PC)-based electronic laboratory. Most implementations of Computer Assisted Learning in electronics and computer science limit themselves to interactive presentation of training material or to software simulations of circuits and systems. WORKBENCH leads the trainee one step further, by allowing, in addition to the above mentioned functions, practical, laboratory-style experimentation on circuits and systems assembled by the student under software guidance. workbench's hardware structure provides the physical tools for data acquisition, I/O and measuring. The hardware is controlled by low-level software primitives that relieve the user from detailed programming of the measurements. Finally, the courseware achieves the integration of hardware, software and teaching resources. The learning material is presented to the trainee in a hypertext structure and the control of the instrumentation interface is transparent to the user. The result is a powerful and flexible teaching tool that lends itself very well to school, industrial training and self-teaching environments. Given its professional characteristics, it can also be used as a test or research tool.

Memory versus logic: two models of organizing information and their influences on web retrieval strategies

We can find the first anticipation of the World Wide Web hypertextual structure in Bush paper of 1945, where he described a “selection” and storage machine called the Memex, capable of keeping the useful information of a user and connecting it to other relevant material present in the machine or added by other users. We will argue that Vannevar Bush, who conceived this type of machine, did it because its involvement with analogical devices. During the 1930s, in fact, he invented and built the Differential Analyzer, a powerful analogue machine, used to calculate various relevant mathematical functions. The model of the Memex is not the digital one, because it relies on another form of data representation that emulates more the procedures of memory than the attitude of the logic used by the intellect. Memory seems to select and arrange information according to association strategies, i.e., using analogies and connections that are very often arbitrary, sometimes even chaotic and completely subjective. The organization of information and the knowledge creation process suggested by logic and symbolic formal representation of data is deeply different from the former one, though the logic approach is at the core of the birth of computer science (i.e., the Turing Machine and the Von Neumann Machine). We will discuss the issues raised by these two “visions” of information management and the influences of the philosophical tradition of the theory of knowledge on the hypertextual organization of content. We will also analyze all the consequences of these different attitudes with respect to information retrieval techniques in a hypertextual environment, as the web. Our position is that it necessary to take into accounts the nature and the dynamic social topology of the network when we choose information retrieval methods for the network; otherwise, we risk creating a misleading service for the end user of web search tools (i.e., search engines).

Memory versus logic: two models of organizing information and their influences on web retrieval strategies

We can find the first anticipation of the World Wide Web hypertextual structure in Bush paper of 1945, where he described a “selection” and storage machine called the Memex, capable of keeping the useful information of a user and connecting it to other relevant material present in the machine or added by other users. We will argue that Vannevar Bush, who conceived this type of machine, did it because its involvement with analogical devices. During the 1930s, in fact, he invented and built the Differential Analyzer, a powerful analogue machine, used to calculate various relevant mathematical functions. The model of the Memex is not the digital one, because it relies on another form of data representation that emulates more the procedures of memory than the attitude of the logic used by the intellect. Memory seems to select and arrange information according to association strategies, i.e., using analogies and connections that are very often arbitrary, sometimes even chaotic and completely subjective. The organization of information and the knowledge creation process suggested by logic and symbolic formal representation of data is deeply different from the former one, though the logic approach is at the core of the birth of computer science (i.e., the Turing Machine and the Von Neumann Machine). We will discuss the issues raised by these two “visions” of information management and the influences of the philosophical tradition of the theory of knowledge on the hypertextual organization of content. We will also analyze all the consequences of these different attitudes with respect to information retrieval techniques in a hypertextual environment, as the web. Our position is that it necessary to take into accounts the nature and the dynamic social topology of the network when we choose information retrieval methods for the network; otherwise, we risk creating a misleading service for the end user of web search tools (i.e., search engines).