Creating Memories: Writing and Designing More Memorable Documents

If communication’s purpose is to enable action or belief (Johnson-Sheehan, 2012), then communication will be more effective—and thus more ethical—if the audience can easily remember it. However, the study of memory has long been neglected in English Studies. Therefore, communicators lack strategies for enhancing documents’ memorableness and an ethical framework for assessing (un)memorable documents and composing processes. To develop an “ethic of memory” and identify strategies that enhance a document’s memorableness, I asked twenty subjects—ten teachers and ten college freshman—to walk down a high school hallway in which various posters and flyers had been posted by the administration, teachers, or students. Then I interviewed the subjects about their recollections, reasons for remembering this information, and the likelihood that they might apply it. One week later, I conducted a follow-up interview to determine which information “stuck,” the subjects’ self-reported reasons why, and their likelihood of applying it. I counted the number of information units and specific details that the subjects remembered at each interview, and I also categorized the types of details they recalled. I coded the subjects’ reasons for remembering and (not) applying information according to commonly-accepted design and psychological terms drawn from Universal Principles of Design by Lidwell et al. The subjects’ memories were very consistent in both quantity and quality from the first to the second interview, indicating that documents influence long-term memory. Certain posters and flyers were remembered much more often than others, demonstrating that rhetorical and design strategies affect a documents’ memorableness. The codes “schema” and “relevance” were very consistent themes in the subjects’ interview responses; so-called “self-schema” shape judgments of relevance, which then affect efforts to encode information into memory. This study describes six strategies for engaging an audience’s collective self-schema, prompting the audience to ascribe relevance to documents and thus endeavor to encode them: convey practical value; use the familiar; use contrast, color, and imagery; use unexpected elements; arouse emotion and build social currency; and “break-and-remake” existing schema

Visual analysis of anatomy ontologies and related genomic information

Challenges in scientific research include the difficulty in obtaining overviews of the large amount of data required for analysis, and in resolving the differences in terminology used to store and interpret information in multiple, independently created data sets. Ontologies provide one solution for analysis involving multiple data sources, improving cross-referencing and data integration. This thesis looks at harnessing advanced human perception to reduce the cognitive load in the analysis of the multiple, complex data sets the bioinformatics user group studied use in research, taking advantage also of users’ domain knowledge, to build mental models of data that map to its underlying structure. Guided by a user-centred approach, prototypes were developed to provide a visual method for exploring users’ information requirements and to identify solutions for these requirements. 2D and 3D node-link graphs were built to visualise the hierarchically structured ontology data, to improve analysis of individual and comparison of multiple data sets, by providing overviews of the data, followed by techniques for detailed analysis of regions of interest. Iterative, heuristic and structured user evaluations were used to assess and refine the options developed for the presentation and analysis of the ontology data. The evaluation results confirmed the advantages that visualisation provides over text-based analysis, and also highlighted the advantages of each of 2D and 3D for visual data analysis.Overseas Research Students Awards SchemeJames Watt Scholarshi