Exploring (the poetics of) strange (and fractal) hypertexts

The ACM Hypertext conference has a rich history of challenging the node-link hegemony of the web. At Hypertext 2011 Pisarski [12] suggested that to refocus on nodes in hypertext might unlock a new poetics, and at Hypertext 2001 Bernstein [3] lamented the lack of strange hypertexts: playful tools that experiment with hypertext structure and form. As part of the emerging Strange Hypertexts community project we have been exploring a number of exotic hypertext tools, and in this paper we set out an early experiment with media and creative writing undergraduates to see what effect one particular form – Fractal Narratives, a hypertext where readers drill down into text in a reoccurring pattern – would have on their writing. In this particular trial, we found that most students did not engage in the structure from a storytelling point of view, although they did find value from a planning point of view. Participants conceptually saw the value in non-linear storytelling but few exploited the fractal structure to actually do this. Participant feedback leads us to conclude that while new poetics do emerge from strange hypertexts, this should be viewed as an ongoing process that can be reinforced and encouraged by designing tools that highlight and support those emerging poetics in a series of feedback loops, and by providing writing contexts where they can be highlighted and collaboratively explore

Beter Leren van Hypertext door Aandachtsturing binnen Grafische Overzichten - een Eye Tracking Onderzoek

Bezdan, E., Kester, L., & Kirschner, P. A. (2011, 9 Juni). Beter Leren van Hypertext door Aandachtsturing binnen Grafische Overzichten - een Eye Tracking Onderzoek. Poster gepresenteerd tijdens de Onderwijs Research Dagen, Maastricht, Nederland.Het vervagen van informatie-elementen die niet langer relevant zijn is een vorm van visuele cueing met als doel de aandacht van de lerende in een bepaalde richting te sturen (Jarodzka, Balslev, Holmquist, Nyström, Scheiter, Gerjets, & Eika, 2010). Aandachtssturing door cueing kan leren bevorderen door ineffectieve cognitieve belasting te verlagen (Amadieu, Mariné, & Laimay, 2011). In deze studie wordt nagegaan in hoeverre deze vorm van cueing in hypertext tot verschillen in de allocatie van aandacht, navigatiegedrag en leeruitkomsten leidt in vergelijking met een situatie zonder cues over de navigatiegeschiedenis

Who is Patrick? – Answers from the Saint Patrick's Confessio HyperStack. Supporting Digital Humanities, Copenhagen 17 - 18 November 2011, Conference Proceedings

Not everyone realizes that there are two Latin works, still surviving, that can definitely be attributed to Saint Patrick’s own authorship. On 14th September 2011 the Royal Irish Academy published his writings in a freely accessible form on line, both in the original Latin and in a variety of modern languages (including Irish). Designed to be of interest to the general public as well as to academic researchers, the Saint Patrick’s Confessio Hypertext Stack includes such features as digital images of the medieval manuscripts involved, a specially commissioned historical reconstruction that evocatively describes life in pre-Viking Ireland, articles, audio presentations, and some ten thousand internal and external digital links that make it truly a resource to be explored

On the Predictability of Talk Attendance at Academic Conferences

This paper focuses on the prediction of real-world talk attendances at academic conferences with respect to different influence factors. We study the predictability of talk attendances using real-world tracked face-to-face contacts. Furthermore, we investigate and discuss the predictive power of user interests extracted from the users' previous publications. We apply Hybrid Rooted PageRank, a state-of-the-art unsupervised machine learning method that combines information from different sources. Using this method, we analyze and discuss the predictive power of contact and interest networks separately and in combination. We find that contact and similarity networks achieve comparable results, and that combinations of different networks can only to a limited extend help to improve the prediction quality. For our experiments, we analyze the predictability of talk attendance at the ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia 2011 collected using the conference management system Conferator

Personalised multilingual hypertext retrieval: An overview

The aims of the workshop on Personalised Multilingual Hypertext Retrieval (PMHR) are twofold: to set the scene in this challenging area, allowing the different communities engaged in related research topics to meet and to determine a program of actions to undertake; to devise a strategy for the evaluation of PMHR systems, which should define the collection of resources to use to evaluate such systems together with the evaluation metrics to use. The workshop results will be of use in the design of personalised tools that can help end-users fully benefit from the use of distributed multilingual hypertext content

Blue hypertext is a perfect design decision: No perceptual disadvantage in reading and successful highlighting of relevant information

Highlighted text in the Internet (i.e. Hypertext) is predominantly blue and underlined. The percept of these hypertext characteristics were heavily questioned by applied research and empirical tests resulted in inconclusive results. The ability to identify blue text in foveal and parafoveal vision was identified as potentially constrained by the low number of foveally centered blue light sensitive retinal cells. The present study investigates if foveal and parafoveal perceptibility of hypertext is reduced during reading. A silent-sentence reading study with simultaneous eye movement recordings and the invisible boundary paradigm, which allows the investigation of foveal and parafoveal perceptibility, separately, was realized. Target words in sentences were presented in either black or blue and either underlined or normal. No effect of color and underlining, but a preview benefit could be detected for first pass reading measures (comparing fixation times after degraded vs. un- degraded parafoveal previews). Fixation time measures that included re-reading (i.e., total viewing times) showed, in addition to a preview effect, a reduced fixation time for not highlighted (black not underlined) in contrast to highlighted target words (either blue or underlined or both). Thus, the present pattern reflects no detectable perceptual disadvantage of hyperlink stimuli but increased attraction of attention resources, after first pass reading, through highlighting. Blue or underlined text allows readers to easily perceive hypertext and at the same time readers re-visited hypertext longer as a consequence of highlighting. On the basis of the present evidence blue hypertext can be safely recommended to web designers for future use.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figure, 1 tabl

Designing the printed book as an interactive environment

Reading a book demands a certain level of interaction from the reader. The cover must be opened and pages turned to navigate the information inside. Conventions have been developed over the life of the book to assist the reader in this navigation and provide orientation. The evolution of electronic reading material has given readers greater opportunities for interacting with their reading material, but many readers still prefer reading from a printed book. This paper investigates how the interactive organizational paradigm of hypertext can be implemented in a printed book to give the reader the opportunity for greater interaction and benefit from some of the advantages that electronic reading environments provide. The investigation in this paper follows an iterative design process in consultation with a panel of four experts. Through four rounds of consultation and refinement two potential solutions were developed for the incorporation of hypertext methods in a printed book