Personal Glossaries on the WWW

Appendix B: About This Article's Format

Without going into too many details, the structure of this article is inspired by lessons gleaned from literature about how humans read and process scholarly articles [Dillon et al., 1989; Olsen, 1994; Bieber, 1996; O'Hara & Sellen, 1997; Blustein, 2000], and the corresponding author's own experiences.

Features not implemented

However, we have not included every feature that we expected would help readers. Our decisions about what to include were partly influenced by the tradeoff between the expected value of each feature and the following (four) factors:

• risk of feature to confuse or disorient users,
• portability of HTML to non-modern browsers,
• accessibility of presentation to users of non-visual browsers, and
• time to implement.

Details about the markup and link types employed are in Appendix A.

Reference lookup

The most substantial drawback we perceive to this presentation is the lack of support for readers' who will want to look up details of citations from the text without losing their place in the main text. We have tried to reduce the need for this by including author surnames and publication years in citations. We considered using either HTML frames (as we did in the glossary experiment described in §4 (Method)) or the use of JavaScript (following the example of Kolb [2004] who combined it with CSS rules to position a link back to the main text beside any reference that the reader follows a link to). If we use such techniques in later publications will depend largely on the comments we receive regarding the presentation of this article.

Comments solicited

As this is the first Document Engineering Conference article to appear in hypertext format, we are especially eager to receive feedback from readers about format (how useful it was, suggestions for improvement, anecdotes about use, etc.) which we might use in a future article. We will also be interested in any comments that are not for publication. Our goal in both the investigation of glossary tools and this new type of presentation is to make a more useful and expressive format for scholarly communication.

Feedback should be addressed to the corresponding author at

Postal

James Blustein,
Faculty of Computer Science,
Dalhousie University,
6050 University Avenue,
Halifax, NS
B3H 1W5 (Canada)

E-mail

<jamie@cs.dal.ca>

Process and Tools Used

Because this form of article is not yet common, it may be helpful to those who follow us to know how we made the article:

1. Noor drafted the original linear document in the Microsoft Word word processing software. That document was based on an earlier report [Noor, 2003].
2. Blustein extracted the text, and organized it into the current format using the Emacs editor.
3. The initial structure, citations, and references list were created and checked with LaTeX, BiBTeX and related tools.
4. Some of the screen captures were made using the Grab utility on the Macintosh; others were made with Windows utilities.
5. The labels in the screen captures were generated with Adobe Illustrator CS (version 11.0.0). The images of the numeric labels were created using the LaTeX Pifont package (by Sebastian Rahtz) and the Zapf Dingbats font (designed by Hermann Zapf).
6. Links and other coding was done by hand. Eric Meyer showed Blustein how to make the plus-sign shaped navigational link menu that appear at the end of most of the nodes. His advice about how to prevent many decrepit browsers (e.g., Netscape version 4) from mangling (as opposed to rendering [see definitions in nearby note]) our webpages with their horribly broken CSS engines was also most welcome.
7. Colours were chosen from the web safe colour palette using the print version of the 216-Color Webmaster's Palette by VisiBone, and images from Lynda Weinman's Non-Dithering Colors in Browsers.
8. The XHTML and CSS coding was checked using the W3C's on-line validation tools.
9. We used Nick Kew's Link Valet's link checker to ensure that both internal and external links were valid.
10. The article was proofread with Netscape 7.1 for the Macintosh (as described in the section about Browser Testing, in Appendix A).
11. Initial metadata (see the the section about metadata in Appendix A) was generated using the DC meta data editor (DC-dot, <URL:http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcdot/>) and DC assistant (DC-assist, <URL:http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcassist/>) from the UKOLN. The RDF file was extensively edited by hand to include some more details, and updates. The NLM Metadata Schema [2004] webpage was most helpful in identifying additional information that could be included.
12. A final note: we spent at least as long designing, coding, and debugging the presentation of this article as we did writing and redrafting the text. This investment of time has certainly hurt the clarity of our text, but we expect that the format will be used, by us and others (with proper citation), in later articles.

End of Appendix B
Where to Next?

References

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

[Allen & Hawkins, 1991]

Joyce M. Allen & Robert Hawkins (editors). The Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 1991.

ISBN 0-19-861266-4.

[Bieber, 1996]

Personal Communication with Michael Bieber at ACM Hypertext Conference regarding WWW version of August 1995 issue of Communications of the ACM [Bieber & Isakowitz, 1995].

[Bieber & Isakowitz, 1995].

Michael Bieber & Tomás Isakowitz. Hypermedia Design. Communications of the ACM, 38(8):26 – 29, August 1995.

<DOI:10.1145/208344.208345>.

[Blustein, 2000]

James Blustein. Automatically generated hypertext versions of scholarly articles and their evaluation. In HT2K, pages 201 – 210, 2000.

<DOI:10.1145/336296.336364>.

[Brockmann et al., 1989]

R. John Brockmann, William Horton, and Kevin Brock. From Database to Hypertext via Electronic Publishing: An Information Odyssey. In Edward Barrett (editor), The Society of Text: Hypertext, Hypermedia, and the Social Construction of Information (ISBN 0-262-52161-X), chapter 11 (pages 162 – 205), MIT Press, 1989.

[Dillon et al., 1989]

Andrew Dillon, John Richardson, and Cliff McKnight. Human Factors of Journal Usage and Design of Electronic Texts. Interacting with Computers, 1(2): 183 – 189, 1989.

[Dillon, 1991]

Andrew Dillon. Readers' models of text structures: the case of academic articles. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 35:913 – 925, 1991.

[Kolb, 2004]

David Kolb. Twin media: hypertext structure under pressure. HT'04. Santa Cruz, CA. ACM Press, 2004.

<DOI:10.1145/1012807.1012817>.

[NLM, 2004]

United States National Library of Medicine. NLM Metadata Schema. [webpage] Last updated: 29 July 2004. Retrieved: 06 September 2004.

<URL:http://www.nlm.nih.gov/tsd/cataloging/metafilenew.html>.

[Noor, 2003]

Mona M. Noor. Online Glossary Tools for Technical Reading. Technical report CS-2003-09, Dalhousie University Faculty of Computer Science, December 2003.

<URL:http://www.cs.dal.ca/research/techreports/2003/CS-2003-09.shtml>.

[O'Hara & Sellen, 1997]

Kenton O'Hara and Abigail Sellen. A Comparison of Reading Paper and On-Line Documents. In CHI'97, pages 335 – 342, 1997.

<DOI:10.1145/258549.258787>.

[Olsen, 1994]

Jan Olsen. Electronic Journal Literature: Implications for Scholars. Mecklermedia, 1994.

ISBN 0-88736-925-1.

& .

[Up to navigation links]