What's Eliza Doing in the Chinese Room? Incoherent Hyperdocuments - and How to Avoid Them

Research on understanding linear texts has shown that comprehension and navigation mainly depend on the reader’s ability to construct a coherent mental representation. While the author of a traditional document can use a variety of structural cues to support his readers in building up such a representation, the author of a hyperdocument faces a new problem. If he wants to ensure that his readers understand the entire hyperdocument as a coherent entity, he needs means to indicate its structure in a comprehensible way. In this paper, we propose a construction kit which provides dedicated design objects for this purpose. The design objects can be characterized as building blocks for three functionally different components of a hyperdocument: its content part, organizational part, and presentation part. In addition to the design objects, we propose some design rules which should guide the construction of coherent hyperdocuments. Keywords Design of hyperdocuments, coherent hyperdocuments...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1991
• Where: HT
• Authors: Manfred Thüring, Jörg M. Haake, Jörg Hannemann
• Keywords: Coherent Hyperdocuments, Coherent Mental Representation, Design Objects, HT 1991, Internet Technology