Browsing by Subject "hypertext"
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Item Audio browsing of automaton-based hypertext(Texas A&M University, 2004-09-30) Ustun, SelenWith the wide-spread adoption of hypermedia systems and the World Wide Web (WWW) in particular, these systems have evolved from simple systems with only textual content to those that incorporate a large content base, which consists of a wide variety of document types. Also, with the increase in the number of users, there has grown a need for these systems to be accessible to a wider range of users. Consequently, the growth of the systems along with the number and variety of users require new presentation and navigation mechanisms for a wider audience. One of the new presentation methods is the audio-only presentation of hypertext content and this research proposes a novel solution to this problem for complex and dynamic systems. The hypothesis is that the proposed Audio Browser is an efficient tool for presenting hypertext in audio format, which will prove to be useful for several applications including browsers for visually-impaired and remote users. The Audio Browser provides audio-only browsing of contents in a Petri-based hypertext system called Context-Aware Trellis (caT). It uses a combination of synthesized speech and pre-recorded speech to allow its user to listen to contents of documents, follow links, and get information about the navigation process. It also has mechanisms for navigating within documents in order to allow users to view contents more quickly.Item Comparison of edit history clustering techniques for spatial hypertext(Texas A&M University, 2006-04-12) Mandal, BikashHistory mechanisms available in hypertext systems allow access to past user interactions with the system. This helps users evaluate past work and learn from past activity. It also allows systems identify usage patterns and potentially predict behaviors with the system. Thus, recording history is useful to both the system and the user. Various tools and techniques have been developed to group and annotate history in Visual Knowledge Builder (VKB). But the problem with these tools is that the operations are performed manually. For a large VKB history growing over a long period of time, performing grouping operations using such tools is difficult and time consuming. This thesis examines various methods to analyze VKB history in order to automatically group/cluster all the user events in this history. In this thesis, three different approaches are compared. The first approach is a pattern matching approach identifying repeated patterns of edit events in the history. The second approach is a rule-based approach that uses simple rules, such as group all consecutive events on a single object. The third approach uses hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) where edits are grouped based on a function of edit time and edit location. The contributions of this thesis work are: (a) developing tools to automatically cluster large VKB history using these approaches, (b) analyzing performance of each approach in order to determine their relative strengths and weaknesses, and (c) answering the question, how well do the automatic clustering approaches perform by comparing the results obtained from this automatic tool with that obtained from the manual grouping performed by actual users on a same set of VKB history. Results obtained from this thesis work show that the rule-based approach performs the best in that it best matches human-defined groups and generates the fewest number of groups. The hierarchic agglomerative clustering approach is in between the other two approaches with regards to identifying human-defined groups. The pattern-matching approach generates many potential groups but only a few matches with those generated by actual VKB users.Item CritSpace: An Interactive Visual Interface to Digital Collections of Cultural Heritage Material(2012-02-14) Audenaert, MichaelCultural heritage digital libraries have become an important and prominent tool within humanities scholarship, offering increased expressive power for representing complex networks of relationships and the ability to use computational tools and interactive environments to help researchers ask new questions. While digital libraries offer tremendous advantages for publishing the final products of scholarship, in the words of Bradley and Vetch, "as they currently are delivered, do not intersect terribly meaningfully with the process of scholarly research." In this work I investigate how scholars use visually complex source documents-materials where access to a visual representation of the original object is required and present a prototype system, CritSpace designed to facilitate scholarly engagement with digital resources. Rather than creating a one-size-fits-all application, CritSpace is a web-based framework for building interactive visual interfaces that support scholarly use of digital libraries. The theory and design behind CritSpace is based on a formative study of the work practices of scholars from different disciplines and prior research in field of spatial hypertext. To illustrate a concrete example of using CritSpace and to evaluate its usefulness, I conclude with a case study that walks through the process of deploying CritSpace to support work in a specific scholarly domain, textual criticism and presents a summative usability study of the tool. The results of this study show that CritSpace is effective at supporting textual criticism. More significantly, they also indicate that the innovations added in CritSpace promote the intensive analysis of visual material in addition to knowledge organization and structuring.Item Hypertextual Ultrastructures: Movement and Containment in Texts and Hypertexts(2010-01-14) Coste, Rosemarie L.The surface-level experience of hypertextuality as formless and unbounded, blurring boundaries among texts and between readers and writers, is created by a deep structure which is not normally presented to readers and which, like the ultrastructure of living cells, defines and controls texts' nature and functions. Most readers, restricted to surface-level interaction with texts, have little access to the deep structure of any hypertext. In this dissertation, I argue that digital hypertexts differ essentially from paper texts in that hypertexts are constructed in multiple layers, with surface-level appearance and behavior controlled by sub-surface ultrastructure, and that these multiple layers of structure enable and necessitate new methods of textual study designed for digital texts. Using participant-observation from within my own practice as a webmaster, I closely examine the sub-surface structural layers that create several kinds of Web-based digital hypertexts: blogs, forums, static Web pages, and dynamic Web pages. With these hypertexts as the primary models, along with their enabling software and additional digital texts-wikis, news aggregators, word processing documents, digital photographs, electronic mail, electronic forms-available to me as a reader/author rather than a webmaster, I demonstrate methods of investigating and describing the development of digital texts. These methods, like methods already established within textual studies to trace the development of printed texts, can answer questions about accidental and intentional textual change, the roles of collaborators, and the ways texts are shaped by production processes and mediating technologies. As a step toward a formalist criticism of hypertext, I propose concrete ways of categorizing, describing, and comparing hypertexts and their components. I also demonstrate techniques for visualizing the structures, histories, and interrelationships of hypertexts and explore methods of using self-descriptive surface elements in paper-like texts as partial substitutes for the sub-surface self-description available in software-like texts. By identifying digitization as a gateway to cooperation between human and artificial intelligences rather than an end in itself, I suggest natural areas of expansion for the humanities computing collaboration as well as new methodologies by which originally-printed texts can be studied in their digital forms alongside originally-digital texts.Item Inquiry-based learning templates for creating online educational paths(Texas A&M University, 2006-10-30) Davis, Sarah AliceWalden's Paths, created by the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries, provides a mechanism for leveraging student learning with the incredible amount of educational material on the web by organizing selected web pages into a structured learning activity. Applying specialized templates to the creation of Walden's Paths can aid a path author in creating pedagogically sound, Web-based activities, by assisting in the collection of information and organization of the activity. Authoring templates may be based on established educational frameworks, learning theories or specific activity type. This research project investigates how using pedagogically based templates affects the authoring process for paths created using Walden's Paths. A template based on the educational framework Inquiry-Based Learning was created and tested by a group of users to determine what effects the template has on creating paths as compared to creating similar paths using the existing Walden's Paths interface.