Catherine C. Marshall

Toward an ecology of hypertext annotation

Annotation is a key way in which hypertexts grow and increase in value. This paper first characterizes annotation according to a set of dimensions to situate a long-term study of a community of annotators. Then, using the results of the study, the paper explores the implications of annotative practice for hypertext concepts and for the development of an ecology of hypertext annotation, in which consensus creates a reading structure from an authorial structure.

Spatial hypertext: designing for change

Introduction Hypertext1, in its most general sense, allows content to appear in different contexts. The immediate setting in which readers encounter a specific segment of material then changes from reading to reading or from reader to reader. Authors collect and structure materials to reflect their own understanding or in anticipation of readers’ possible interests, needs, or ability to comprehend the substrate of interrelated content.

Going digital: a look at assumptions underlying digital libraries

What are digital libraries, how should they be designed, how will they be used, and what relationship will they bear to what we now call “libraries”? Although we cannot hope to answer all these crucial questions in this short article, we do hope to encourage, and in some small measure to shape, the dialog among computer scientists, librarians, and other interested parties out of which answers may arise. Our contribution here is to make explicit, and to question, certain assumptions that underlie current digital library efforts. We will argue that current efforts are limited by a largely unexamined and unintended allegiance to an idealized view of what libraries have been, rather than what they actually are or could be. Since these limits come from current ways of thinking about the problem, rather than being inherent in the technology or in social practice, expanding our conception of digital libraries should serve to expand the scope and the utility of development efforts.

VIKI: spatial hypertext supporting emergent structure

The emergent nature of structure is a crucial, but often ignored, constraint on authoring hypertexts. VIKI is a spatial hypertext system that supports the emergent qualities of structure and the abstractions that guide its creation. We have found that a visual/spatial metaphor for hypertext allows people to express the nuances of structure, especialy ambiguous, partial, or emerging structure, more easily. VIKI supports interpretation of a collected body of materials, a task that becomes increasingly important with the availability of on-line information sources. The tools data model includes semi-structured objects, collections that provide the basis for spatial navigation, and object composites, all of which may evolve into types. A spatial parser supports this evolution and enhances user interaction with changing, visually apparent organizations.

Aquanet: a hypertext tool to hold your knowledge in place

Hypertext systems have traditionally focused on information management and presentation. In contrast, the Aquanet hypertext system described in this paper is designed to support knowledge structuring tasks. Aquanet is a browser-based tool that allows users to graphically represent information in order to explore its structure. In this paper, we discuss our motivations for developing Aquanet. We then describe the basic concepts underlying the tool and give an overview of the user interface. We close with some brief comments about our initial experiences with the tool in use and some of the directions we see the Aquanet research moving in the near future.

Spatial hypertext and the practice of information triage

Information triage is the process of sorting through relevant materials, and organizing them to meet the needs of the task at hand. It is a practice that has become increasingly common with the advent of “at your fingertips” information resources. To explore the characteristics of information triage and its interaction with spatial hypertext, a medium we claim supports the process, we have studied subjects engaged in a time-constrained decision-making task using a large set of relevant documents. We use the study task to investigate information triage under three different conditions: one in which the participants used paper documents, and two others in which the participants used variants of VIKI, a spatial hypertext system. Our findings suggest that during information triage attentional resources are devoted to evaluating materials and organizing them, so they can be read and reread as they return to mind. Accordingly, hypertext tools to support the practice should facilitate the rapid assimilation and assessment of new material, aid in the creation and management of a fluid category structure, allow readers to track their own progress through the information, and use minimum-effort methods to promote the intelligibility of results.

Hypertext paths and the World-Wide Web: experiences with Walden's Paths

Walden’s Paths applies the concept of hypertextual paths to the World-Wide Web. Walden’s Paths is being developed for use in the K–12 school environment. The heterogeneity of the Web coupled with the desirability of supporting the teacher-student relationship make this an interesting and challenging project. We describe the Walden’s Paths implementation, discuss the elements that affected its design and architecture, and report on our experiences with the system in use.

Guided tours and on-line presentations: how authors make existing hypertext intelligible for readers

Hypertext systems like NoteCards provide facilities for authoring large networks. But they provide little support for the associated task of making these networks intelligible to future readers. Presentation conventions may be imported from other related media, but because the conventions have not yet been negotiated within a community of hypertext readers and writers, they provide only a partial solution to the problem of guiding a reader through an existing network of information. In this paper, we will discuss how a recent facility, Guided Tours, has been used to organize hypertext networks for presentation. The use of Guided Tours in NoteCards has exposed a set of authoring issues, and has provided us with examples of solutions to the problems associated with on-line presentations.

Which semantic web

Through scenarios in the popular press and technical papers in the research literature, the promise of the Semantic Web has raised a number of different expectations. These expectations can be traced to three different perspectives on the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is portrayed as: (1) a universal library, to be readily accessed and used by humans in a variety of information use contexts; (2) the backdrop for the work of computational agents completing sophisticated activities on behalf of their human counterparts; and (3) a method for federating particular knowledge bases and databases to perform anticipated tasks for humans and their agents. Each of these perspectives has both theoretical and pragmatic entailments, and a wealth of past experiences to guide and temper our expectations. In this paper, we examine all three perspectives from rhetorical, theoretical, and pragmatic viewpoints with an eye toward possible outcomes as Semantic Web efforts move forward.

The reading appliance revolution

In the 1970s, Alan Kay and his colleagues at Xerox PARC envisioned a dynamic, interactive electronic book. Now, nearly 30 years later, that vision has become a reality. A new kind of personal infor...In the 1970s, Alan Kay and his colleagues at Xerox PARC envisioned a dynamic, interactive electronic book. Now, nearly 30 years later, that vision has become a reality. A new kind of personal information appliance-the reading appliance-is emerging as a tool for serious readers. But is the world ready for reading appliances? The authors believe that these appliances are indeed viable. Advances in mobile hardware have made it possible to build the necessary hardware. Additionally, the Web has created a market for online reading by introducing millions of people to it, and books, magazines, newspapers, advertisements, and other printed matter can be produced and read at very low cost. Network based digital libraries increase the availability of information, but people still tend to print the documents to work with them. Electronic book and document readers will neither replace paper nor will they replace desktop computers. Instead, they will occupy their own unique and valuable role in our lives, bringing the paper and computer worlds closer together.