Personal Glossaries on the WWW

3. Brief Background

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We are trying to determine what users need in a hypertextual glossary tool before we commit to build a full-scale one. It has been many years since anyone reported on any basic human factors work on glossaries. In this brief section we present the most salient of the background materials that appear in the full background section.

The visual presentation of glossaries is very important to their success since readers need to make meaningful associations between words and their meanings [Wright, 1991; Black , 1992; Wright, 1993]. Often when readers encounter the same term in different parts of a text they can find it difficult to recognize a meaningful relationship between the parts of the text [Charney, 1994].

Specific user interface issues to be considered are:

• terms to be defined need to be identified in the text but not in a way that distracts the reader;
• the complete list of words that are defined and links to their definitions should always be available (in part because some readers prefer to read them all at once rather than interrupting their reading of the text to look up definitions);
• definitions should not be presented so as to occlude the text or users tend to become confused and unwilling to use the glossary while reading the text.

We expect that by using glossary tools readers will be able to understand texts better and discover associations between concepts that they would not have been able to without such tools.

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References

References for works cited in this text chunk appear below. References for all works cited are available in a separate chunk.

[Black , 1992]

A. Black, P. Wright, and K. Norman. Consulting on-line dictionary information while reading. Hypermedia, 4(3):145 – 169, 1992.

[Charney, 1994]

Davida Charney. The effect of hypertext on processes of reading and writing. In C. L. Selfe and S. Hilligoss (editors), Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning with Technology (ISBN 0-873-52580-9), chapter 10 (pages 238 – 263). The Modern Language Association of America, New York, NY, 1994.

[Wright, 1991]

Patricia Wright. Cognitive overheads and prostheses: Some issues in evaluating hypertexts. In HT'91, pages 1 – 12. ACM Press, 1991.

<DOI:10.1145/122974.122975>.

[Wright, 1993]

Patricia Wright. To jump or not to jump: Strategy selection while reading electronic texts. In C. McKnight, A. Dillon, and J. Richardson (editors), Hypertext: A Psychological Perspective (ISBN 0-134-41643-0), chapter 6 (pages 137 – 152). Ellis Horwood, 1993.

[Non-authoritative link: <URL:http://telecaster.lboro.ac.uk/HaPP/chapter6.html>].

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