Word Processing Systems Research Articles

Learning a word processing system with training wheels and guided exploration

A Training Wheels interface creates a reduced functionality system intended to prevent new users from suffering the consequences of certain types of common errors when they exercise system functions and procedures. This has been shown to be an effective training system design for learning basic text editing functions [4]. We extend this result by examining the extent to which training wheels learners can transfer their skills to interaction with the full-function system. The experiment reported here indicates that training wheels subjects were better able to perform advanced full-system editing functions than subjects who were trained on the full system itself.

Learning a word processing system with training wheels and guided exploration

A Training Wheels interface creates a reduced functionality system intended to prevent new users from suffering the consequences of certain types of common errors when they exercise system functions and procedures. This has been shown to be an effective training system design for learning basic text editing functions [4]. We extend this result by examining the extent to which training wheels learners can transfer their skills to interaction with the full-function system. The experiment reported here indicates that training wheels subjects were better able to perform advanced full-system editing functions than subjects who were trained on the full system itself.

Transfer between word processing systems

A study was conducted to examine knowledge transfer between word processing systems. The study examined the performance of naive subjects learning to use a word processing system, as well as performance of individuals with word processing experience as they learned to use a new system. Subjects initially familiar with one system carried out a series of tasks on this system and then were asked to carry out a similar series of tasks on a second system with which they were initially unfamiliar. The second systems varied in similarity to the first system along several dimensions. Subject performance was significantly slower on the second set of tasks for all groups compared to a control group using a single system. The reduced performance is attributed primarily to 'syntactic' differences in the user interfaces of the systems.

Multilingual translation techniques in the analysis of narrative medical text

The feasibility of computer translation of scientific and medical documents is controversial. This report describes a minicomputer-based translation system (TRANSOFT) that employs word order rearrangement followed by word-for-word translation and resolution of ambiguities based on context. This translation system was applied to an entire medical textbook written in German and to short medical texts written in French, Italian, Spanish and Turkish. Results suggest the versatility of TRANSOFT for narrowly defined translation problems. As foreign language medical documents and medical records become increasingly available in computer readable form through word processing, computerized typesetting and hospital information systems, computer translation methods may provide a rapid and inexpensive means of obtaining draft translations.

Prescription: office automation.

The mission statement of Minneapolis Children's Medical Center reads, in part, "Mindful of the unique characteristics of children, MCMC's missions is to provide a team of health care professionals attuned to the special needs of the total child, at all ages from prenatal through adolescent, in a uniquely designed facility." Therefore an "open" professional staff, rather than a medical staff, was established consisting of physicians, dentists, and other health professionals with advanced degrees at the master's level or above, including, but not limited to, psychologists, social workers, clinical nurse specialists, chaplains, audiologists, and speech pathologists. This professional staff has grown to 650 members, extremely large for a 122-bed hospital. The professional staff office needed help in managing the volume of information associated with this large staff. To meet that need, in addition to the needs of other hospital areas, MCMC's administration made the decision to purchase office automation equipment and established a committee of hospital-wide users, rather than managerial staff, to survey their own needs, select vendors, and make the final recommendation. The word-processing system selected now maintains 650 physician profiles, each with 44 variables. Whereas prior to automation 25 separate lists needed to be updated each time a professional staff member was either added or deleted, now only individual physician profiles need to be adjusted. Programs were then designed to automate the many reports that must be done. In this paper we propose to describe this selection process and relate how the system developed has streamlined and simplified the work of the professional staff office to enable it to increase its output by over 300% without adding staff.

Linking microcomputers and dedicated word processing systems for increased productivity

With the decline in cost of hardware, more and more professionals are acquiring personal computers at their desk. Most common uses of these office computers are word processing and spreadsheet (e.g. LOTUS 123, MULTIMATE, FRAMEWORK, etc. 1 1 Disclaimer: Mention of names of commercial products in this paper does not constitute endorsement by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. ) applications. Professionals typically generate text directly on the personal computer (in lieu of hand written copy) and use spreadsheet programs to tabulate and analyze collected field data. A problem in some offices is integrating text and data prepared on the personal computer with existing dedicated word processing systems which have existed in many office environments for some time. One solution is to have the text and tabulated data retyped into the word processing system, however, this approach is not an effective use of resources. The Industrial Hygiene Section, Industrywide Studies Branch (DSHEFS), NIOSH has developed procedures for electronically linking personal microcomputers with an office-wide word processing system. Using a commercially available hardware “board” (which may be inserted into an open slot in an IBM-PC or compatible), the rough copy report and tabulated spreadsheet data can be electronically linked and “uploaded” from a microcomputer to the word processing system. At NIOSH, a WANG word processing system is the office-wide system for preparing and publishing final reports. This system is not readily compatible with IBM-PC (or similar) microcomputers; however, using MULTIMATE (a commercially available word processing program) and the hardware board, documents can be readily transferred to the WANG virtually unchanged from the copy generated on the microcomputer. Importantly, spreadsheet data can be similarly transferred and linked to a document on the WANG wordprocessing system. This paper describes the sequence of steps, along with necessary hardware and software, to achieve the integration of written documents and numerical data (analyzed by LOTUS 123) from a microcomputer to a office-wide WANG word processing system.

Information Technology: Personnel, Where Are You?

Many commentators believe that we are racing into the age of Information Technology (IT). If in most cases the reality lags some way behind the image, it nevertheless remains the case that organisations are increasingly investing in, or considering investing in, a wide range of new high technologies. In manufacturing firms, for example, computerised numerically controlled machine tools are in widespread application, and robots, flexible manufacturing systems and computer‐aided design are no longer rare. A similar picture emerges with regard to office‐based technologies, such as management information and word processing systems, and within service‐oriented organisations where innovations include, for example, Electronic Point Of Sale (EPOS) in retailing and direct debit and credit transfer in banking.

Common Sense Wordworking: Writing with a Personal Computer

Writing with a Personal Computerpersonal computers, in and out of business, is word processing, which the author feels might more accurately be thought of as wordworking. That is also the area in which personal computers can be the most helpful to a library or a professional user. It is likely that there are more programs available for wordworking than for any other personal computing task. The author discusses some of the problems occasional writers experience, how a personal computer can help overcome them, features that professional writers should look for in a word processor, and how word processing works. Four contemporary word processing systems are used as examples. This material is excerpted from Crawford's book Common Sense Personal Computing: A Handbook for Professionals (copyright 1986 by Walt Crawford), to be published by Pierian Press this year.

Developing Writing and Word Processing Skills with Visually Impaired Children: A Beginning

The Apple Education Foundation awarded a two-year joint project to Peabody College for Teachers and Tennessee School for the Blind (TSB) for the purpose of studying the development of word processing skills by visually handicapped students. Apple IIe microcomputers, printers, software, and specialized technological aids are now being used by students and teachers at TSB and by preservice teachers at Peabody College. This article discusses the project's conceptual framework, activities at the project site, and a module developed to introduce students to the Braille–Edit word processing system.

Exploring Exploring a Word Processor

Studies of people learning to use contemporary word-processing equipment suggest that effective learning is often active, proceeding by self-initiated problem solving. The instructional manuals that accompany current word-processing systems often penalize and impede active learning. A set of instructional materials was constructed for a commercial word processor, specifically designed to support and encourage an active learning orientation. These guided exploration (GE) materials are modular, task oriented, procedurally incomplete, and address error recognition and recovery. Learners using the GE materials spent substantially less time yet still performed better on a transfer of learning posttest than learners using commercially developed self-study materials. Qualitative analysis of aspects of the learning protocols of participants suggested that active learning mechanisms may underlie this advantage.

Word Processors—Looking Outside

It is easy to under‐rate the potential of a word processing system and the role it can play both in local and remote communications. Two or more word processors linked to the same network and equipped with the necessary software, allow messages to be transmitted in seconds, eliminating the need for note‐writing. The communications link makes it possible to reproduce text on other types of printer and phototypesetting equipment and the addition of the appropriate communications board enables access to mainframe or minicomputer databases. A telephone link widens the scope to include Telecom Gold, Prestel, telex and private videotex services; messages can be sent internationally and stored in magnetic memory mailboxes. The linking of word processors and communications creates a rapid, wide, information gathering and processing capacity under the control of a single keyboard.

Planning and implementing the right word processing system

Planning and implementing the right word processing system

A word processing-linked FORTRAN data base of journal and book references

A FORTRAN program for the creation and main­ tenance of a direct-access of journal and book refer­ ences is described. References stored in the can be accessed by an access number, an author name, or a key­ word and written to a user-designated runoff file in American Psychological Association (APA) format. Such a data base can be kept as a library of references to be accessed for a bibliography or literature compilation. The problem of maintaining an organized of jour­ nal and book references is common to all researchers. In­ dex card files are often time-consuming to maintain and have become outdated in research laboratories where papers and proposals are typically prepared using word processing systems on a laboratory computer. The pur­ pose of this program is to simplify the task of preparing a paper or proposal by making use of an active data base ofjournal and book references in connection with a word processing system.

Legal documentation: The role of the European patent office

Legal documentation at the EPO is primarily concerned with three areas relating to the EPC: historical documentation, legal sources, case law. Whereas the historical documentation will probably continue to be implemented with traditional documentation methods, electronic data bases are particularly well suited for access to sources of the law including primary and delegated legislation and for case law, since these originate at the EPO and data carriers can be produced as by-products of the publication process at the EPO. The data may be used for building up a data base for the purposes of the EPO itself as well as for public use, or could be supplied at low cost to external data base operators. In order to facilitate access to the rapidly developing case law the EPO maintains electronic headnote and keyword files in the three official languages of the EPO. Providing online access to these files must be seriously considered. Since in contrast to full text files these files are still comparatively small, it is not necessary to use a large computer, and word processing systems can be used for these documentation tasks.

Error Correction during Text Entry with Word-Processing Systems

To answer questions related to keying errors and error corrections, performance data were collected from typists as they keyed text into a simulated word-processing system. Data are presented on the frequency of error detection, the amount of time spent correcting errors, the number of characters erased per error correction, and the types of errors corrected. Comparisons are also made between corrected and uncorrected errors.

Monthly report pyramid

Westinghouse Electric Corporation's Water Reactor Division Office Systems Operations group has developed a process that pyramids the text of first-level managers' monthly reports into a departmental report for the second-level manager. The individual reports are typed and read into a word processing system through an optical character recognition device and telecommunicated to the central site where they are electronically combined into a departmental summary report. The second-level manager can then use a CRT for a final edit or send the document to word processing for additions or corrections. The biggest advantage of this process is that the second-level manager no longer has to wade through paper and cut and paste to prepare the monthly report.

Operator corrections during text entry with word processing systems: Neal, A.S., and Emmons, W.H. In: Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 26th Annual Meeting, Seattle, Washington, 25–29 October 1982, Edited by Richard E. Edwards, 1982, pp 625–628

Operator corrections during text entry with word processing systems: Neal, A.S., and Emmons, W.H. In: Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 26th Annual Meeting, Seattle, Washington, 25–29 October 1982, Edited by Richard E. Edwards, 1982, pp 625–628

Mnemonic strategies in word processing systems

The useability of character mnemonics in office information systems is discussed and several issues involved in the use of mnemonics as effective design concept are highlighted in the context of word processing tasks. In a series of studies, the mnemonics technique was compared to other user interfaces, such as function-key interface or menu-driven interface. In these studies we found significant differences between novices and experienced operators with respect to ease of performance and ease of recall of word processing operations. Our results suggest that experience plays an important role in operating a mnemonics-driven system compared to a non-mnemonics driven system. Additional research is needed in order to understand the ways by which mnemonics strategies affect the performance of office information systems.

Word processors for qualitative sociologists: A review essay

To reiterate, we think word processors driven by microcomputers can be used effectively for processing notes, observations and other textual data collected through qualitative research methods and later for analyzing them. Of course, machines cannot analyze data, engender concepts, or write insightful prose. In fact, these machines can do nothing that humans do not instruct them to do. InAnalyzing Social Settings, John Lofland describes the overlap of observation and analysis in a project and suggests the use of a general file structure and mechanical procedures “that can stimulate on-going analysis during observation” (1971:118). Whatever the system one uses, if the interplay between what is observed and what is made sociologically meaningful can be less a clerical task, then so much the better. In sum, we think word-processing systems can help a sociologist electronically “cut and paste” raw text files and spur the researcher into producing superior files and reports.

A Melanoma Registry based on a computer-run word and data processing system

A Melanoma Register, previously organised on a filing card system, has been largely transferred to a computer which utilises both word and data processing programs. This transfer has revolutionised not only the analytical potential of the material, but the follow up of all patients, both old and new. The system is applicable to many other tumours and diseases.