Evaluating electronic textbooks : a methodology

EBONI (Electronic Books ON-screen Interface) [1] builds on the premise to emerge from the Visual Book [2] and WEB Book projects [3], that appearance is important in the design of electronic textbooks, and offers an evaluation model, or general methodology, from which ebook usability experiments in a range of areas can be extracted and remain comparable at a basic level. The methodology sets out options for selecting material, participants, tasks and techniques, which vary in cost and level of sophistication. Results from each study will feed into a set of best practice guidelines for producing electronic textbooks on the Web, reflecting the requirements of students and academics throughout the UK

Pervasive and standalone computing: The perceptual effects of variable multimedia quality.

The introduction of multimedia on pervasive and mobile communication devices raises a number of perceptual quality issues, however, limited work has been done examining the 3-way interaction between use of equipment, quality of perception and quality of service. Our work measures levels of informational transfer (objective) and user satisfaction (subjective)when users are presented with multimedia video clips at three different frame rates, using four different display devices, simulating variation in participant mobility. Our results will show that variation in frame-rate does not impact a user’s level of information assimilation, however, does impact a users’ perception of multimedia video ‘quality’. Additionally, increased visual immersion can be used to increase transfer of video information, but can negatively affect the users’ perception of ‘quality’. Finally, we illustrate the significant affect of clip-content on the transfer of video, audio and textual information, placing into doubt the use of purely objective quality definitions when considering multimedia presentations

A Benchmark for Image Retrieval using Distributed Systems over the Internet: BIRDS-I

The performance of CBIR algorithms is usually measured on an isolated workstation. In a real-world environment the algorithms would only constitute a minor component among the many interacting components. The Internet dramati-cally changes many of the usual assumptions about measuring CBIR performance. Any CBIR benchmark should be designed from a networked systems standpoint. These benchmarks typically introduce communication overhead because the real systems they model are distributed applications. We present our implementation of a client/server benchmark called BIRDS-I to measure image retrieval performance over the Internet. It has been designed with the trend toward the use of small personalized wireless systems in mind. Web-based CBIR implies the use of heteroge-neous image sets, imposing certain constraints on how the images are organized and the type of performance metrics applicable. BIRDS-I only requires controlled human intervention for the compilation of the image collection and none for the generation of ground truth in the measurement of retrieval accuracy. Benchmark image collections need to be evolved incrementally toward the storage of millions of images and that scaleup can only be achieved through the use of computer-aided compilation. Finally, our scoring metric introduces a tightly optimized image-ranking window.Comment: 24 pages, To appear in the Proc. SPIE Internet Imaging Conference 200

Exploiting multimedia in creating and analysing multimedia Web archives

The data contained on the web and the social web are inherently multimedia and consist of a mixture of textual, visual and audio modalities. Community memories embodied on the web and social web contain a rich mixture of data from these modalities. In many ways, the web is the greatest resource ever created by human-kind. However, due to the dynamic and distributed nature of the web, its content changes, appears and disappears on a daily basis. Web archiving provides a way of capturing snapshots of (parts of) the web for preservation and future analysis. This paper provides an overview of techniques we have developed within the context of the EU funded ARCOMEM (ARchiving COmmunity MEMories) project to allow multimedia web content to be leveraged during the archival process and for post-archival analysis. Through a set of use cases, we explore several practical applications of multimedia analytics within the realm of web archiving, web archive analysis and multimedia data on the web in general

Stars in their eyes: What eye-tracking reveal about multimedia perceptual quality

Perceptual multimedia quality is of paramount importance to the continued take-up and proliferation of multimedia applications: users will not use and pay for applications if they are perceived to be of low quality. Whilst traditionally distributed multimedia quality has been characterised by Quality of Service (QoS) parameters, these neglect the user perspective of the issue of quality. In order to redress this shortcoming, we characterise the user multimedia perspective using the Quality of Perception (QoP) metric, which encompasses not only a user’s satisfaction with the quality of a multimedia presentation, but also his/her ability to analyse, synthesise and assimilate informational content of multimedia. In recognition of the fact that monitoring eye movements offers insights into visual perception, as well as the associated attention mechanisms and cognitive processes, this paper reports on the results of a study investigating the impact of differing multimedia presentation frame rates on user QoP and eye path data. Our results show that provision of higher frame rates, usually assumed to provide better multimedia presentation quality, do not significantly impact upon the median coordinate value of eye path data. Moreover, higher frame rates do not significantly increase level of participant information assimilation, although they do significantly improve overall user enjoyment and quality perception of the multimedia content being shown

The WEB Book experiments in electronic textbook design

This paper describes a series of three evaluations of electronic textbooks on the Web, which focused on assessing how appearance and design can affect users' sense of engagement and directness with the material. The EBONI Project's methodology for evaluating electronic textbooks is outlined and each experiment is described, together with an analysis of results. Finally, some recommendations for successful design are suggested, based on an analysis of all experimental data. These recommendations underline the main findings of the evaluations: that users want some features of paper books to be preserved in the electronic medium, while also preferring electronic text to be written in a scannable style

Predicting the readability of transparent text

Will a simple global masking model based on image detection be successful at predicting the readability of transparent text? Text readability was measured for two types of transparent text: additive (as occurs in head-up displays) and multiplicative (which occurs in see-through liquid crystal display virtual reality displays). Text contrast and background texture were manipulated. Data from two previous experiments were also included (one using very low contrasts on plain backgrounds, and the other using higher-contrast opaque text on both plain and textured backgrounds). All variables influenced readability in at least an interactive manner. When there were background textures, the global masking index (that combines text contrast and background root mean square contrast) was a good predictor of search times (r = 0.89). When the masking was adjusted to include the text pixels as well as the background pixels in computations of mean luminance and contrast variability, predictability improved further (r = 0.91)

What Drives Volunteers to Accept a Digital Platform That Supports NGO Projects?

Technology has become the driving force for both economic and social change. However, the recruitment of volunteers into the projects of non-profit-making organizations (NGO) does not usually make much use of information and communication technology (ICT). Organizations in this sector should incorporate and use digital platforms in order to attract the most well-prepared and motivated young volunteers. The main aim of this paper is to use an extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to analyze the acceptance of a technological platform that provides a point of contact for non-profit-making organizations and potential volunteers. The TAM is used to find the impact that this new recruitment tool for volunteers can have on an ever-evolving industry. The TAM has been extended with the image and reputation and visual identity variables in order to measure the influence of these non-profit-making organizations on the establishment and implementation of a social network recruitment platform. The data analyzed are from a sample of potential volunteers from non-profit-making organizations in Spain. A structural equation approach using partial least squares was used to evaluate the acceptance model. The results provide an important contribution to the literature about communication in digital environments by non-profit-making organizations as well as strategies to improve their digital reputation