Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oklahoma State University, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 114-123).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Maryland at College Park, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 244-254).

Techn. Universiẗat, Diss., 2005--Darmstadt.

No description available.

Since MYCIN, explanation has become a fundamental feature of knowledge-based systems (KBS). Among the common deficiencies of KBS explanations, the most acute one is the lack of knowledge. This dissertation research investigates the use of explanations provided with hypertext for increasing the availability and accessibility of domain knowledge. The ultimate objective is to determine the behavioral and cognitive basis of the use of hypertext in providing KBS explanations. Two informationally equivalent KBS were comparatively studied in a laboratory setting: one used hypertext to provide explanations, while the other one used conventional lineartext. The experiment involved 26 experienced professionals, and 29 undergraduate and graduate students specializing in accounting. Subjects used the experimental KBS to work on a realistic problem of financial analysis. Both the process and outcomes of explanation use were assessed. Outcome variables included improvement in decision accuracy, trust in the KBS, and perceived usefulness of explanations. In addition to questionnaires used to measure decision accuracy and perceptions, computer logs were used to capture the number, type, and context of explanation use. Thinkingaloud procedures were used to assess the nature of explanation use. Results indicate that the use of hypertext for providing explanations significantly improved decision accuracy, and influenced users' preference for explanation types, and the number and context of explanation requests. Enhanced accessibility to deep explanations via the use of hypertext significantly increased the number of deep explanations requested by both novices and experts. Verbal protocol analysis shows that the lack of knowledge and means of accessing deep explanations could make it difficult to understand KBS recommendations, and that deep explanations could improve the understandability of KBS advice, especially in cases where unfamiliar domain concepts were involved. In the hypertext group, about 37% of the deep explanations were requested in the context of judgment making, rather than in the abstract. While only about 28% of the deep explanations requested by the lineartext group were the How type, 42% were the How type for the hypertext group. Experts and novices had different preferences for explanation types. Experts requested a much higher percentage of How, and lower percentages of Why and Strategic explanations, than novices. Verbal protocol analysis illustrates that experts and novices used explanations for different purposes. / Business, Sauder School of / Management Information Systems, Division of / Graduate

Les pastiches-Zola constituent un signe de réception de l’œuvre zolienne. Le style de l’auteur des Rougon-Macquart est toujours ciblé plus d’un siècle après sa mort par les auteurs de ce type de réécriture. Notre travail de recherche pose le problème de l’appropriation mimétique et/ou différentielle des pastiches-Zola postérieurs à sa mort. La question centrale à traiter est celle de savoir comment Zola est imité dans ces pastiches. Le pastiche implique le phénomène de reprise textuelle qui est caractérisé par l’existence de deux types de textes : l’hypertexte (texte dérivé) et l’hypotexte (texte imité). Une approche comparative associée aux théories de l’intertextualité et de l’hypertextualité nous a permis de découvrir que les pasticheurs de Zola s’inspirent de ses romans et des œuvres d’autres auteurs célèbres. Ils produisent ainsi des pastiches à hypotexte simple, double ou multiple. Les pastiches-Zola se distinguent aussi par leur visée interne (littéraire) ou externe (politique, publicitaire). Les pastiches à visées externes montrent que leurs auteurs documentent les faits sociaux de leur époque comme le faisait Zola. Certains pasticheurs font preuve d’engagement (littéraire) en s’attaquant, mais de manière indirecte, aux personnalités politiques de leur époque. En plus de leurs intentions, leur représentation du style de Zola diversifie leurs productions écrites. Chaque pasticheur obéit à certaines règles d’imitation liées de manière générale aux principes de ressemblance et de différence. Certains pastiches sont ainsi plus inventifs et/ou plus représentatifs du style zolien que d’autres. L’étude des manières imitantes des pasticheurs permet de mener une réflexion sur la notion du style dont les définitions paraissent floues. Les pasticheurs ne s’attardent plus seulement sur la thématique zolienne qui a été très critiquée de son vivant et même après sa mort. Ils allient les thèmes aux procédés stylistiques et expriment, de ce fait, une reconnaissance des qualités poétiques de l’œuvre du chef de file du naturalisme. Les pastiches-Zola produits au XXe et à l’aube du XXIe siècles apparaissent donc, non seulement comme une analyse critique de cette œuvre, mais aussi comme une critique des critiques partielles ou partiales qui ont précédé le renouvellement de la lecture des textes de l’auteur de Médan. L’imbrication des procédés stylistiques et des thèmes zoliens repris et adaptés aux contextes des pasticheurs montre que le style littéraire convoque à la fois les dimensions idiosyncrasiques et sociologiques des façons d’écrire propres à un écrivain, le style n’étant pas un phénomène abstrait mais une série de choix formels et thématiques historiquement situés et dont l’imitation est grandement déterminée par des représentations. / Zola-pastiches are a sign of reception of Zola’s literary works. More than a centuryafter his death, his style is still targeted by the authors of this type of rewriting. Our researchposes the problem of mimetic or differential appropriation of Zola-pastiches posterior to hisdeath. How the author of Les Rougon-Macquart is imitated in these pastiches is our mainresearch question. A pastiche is a writing that implies a textual repeat characterized by theexistence of two types of texts: the hypertext (derived text) and the hypotext (source text). Acomparative approach linked to the theories of intertextuality and hypertextuality has enabledus to discover that the imitators of Zola draw inspiration from his writings and also from thewritings of other authors. They thus produce pastiches with single, double or multiplehypotexts. The distinction between Zola-pastiches is also based on their internal (literary) orexternal (political, advertising) aim. The authors of pastiches with external aims documentthe social facts of their era just like Zola did in his novels. Some authors show a literaryengagement by attacking political leaders but indirectly. In addition to their aims, theirrepresentation of Zola’s style diversifies their writings. Each writer conforms to someimitation rules which are generally related to the principles of similarities and differences.Some pastiches are therefore move creative and/or more representative of Zola’s style thanothers. The study of the imitative ways of pastiches’ writers implies a reflection on theconcept of style whose definitions seem unclear. These writers no longer focus only onZola’s thematic which has been highly criticized during his life time and even after his death.They blend themes and stylistic devices, thus acknowledging the poetic quality of the literaryworks of the naturalism founder. The Zola-pastiches written during the 20th and at thebeginning of the 21st centuries therefore appear to be a critical analysis of these works as wellas the criticism of the partial or one-sided criticism that preceded the renewed interest in thereading of the author of Medan’s texts. The imbrication of stylistic devices and themesborrowed from Zola and adapted to new contexts shows that the literary style convokes theidiosyncratic and sociologic dimensions of an author’s specific way of writing, given that,style is not an abstract phenomenon but a series of formal and thematic choices which arehistorically located and whose imitation is highly determined by representations.

Denna studie undersöker tillgängligheten och utbudet av hypertextuell skönlitteratur i skol- och kommunbibliotek. Förutom antal och placering av hypertextuella böcker graderades även böckerna efter de faktorer som påverkar intern och extern motivation för att kunna analysera dessas korrelation. Genom summeringsstatistik påvisas således hur dessa aspekter framträder hos åtta skol- och kommunbibliotek i fyra olika städer och två län. Resultatet visar att möjligheterna för att elever i lågstadiet kan utveckla sin interna motivation till läsning genom att komma i kontakt med hypertextuell skönlitteratur är mycket låg.

No description available.

Three methods of indicating active (linked) words in hypertext documents were investigated. The Methods consisted of font-manipulation techniques (such as shadowed and outlined text), word-enclosure techniques (variations of a box and pseudo-brackets around the word), and "punctuation-like" icons (located directly above the first letter of an active word). Two Cues were nested within each Method, yielding a total of six Cues. Twenty-four subjects (12 males and 12 females) performed reading tasks and visual search tasks to evaluate each of the three Methods and six Cues. A hierarchical, within-subjects experimental design was used, employing a completely counterbalanced order of treatments. The study consisted of two experiments. For Experiment 1 (reading tasks), participants read Tinker (1955) passages and identified an inappropriate word in each passage. Passages contained either one of the six Cues or no Cues (control condition). The times taken to read each passage and locate the target word, as well as the number of errors made, were recorded. For Experiment 2 (visual search tasks), participants scanned text fields and located and counted the number of active words contained within each text field; again, the times taken to locate all active words and the number of errors made were recorded. For both experiments, participants rated Cueing Methods along various dimensions and selected a preferred Cue and Method for the tasks performed in each of the two experiments. For reading tasks, no single Cueing Method yielded significantly shorter reading times than any other Method. Similarly, no particular Method was preferred by significantly more participants than any other Method. However, user ratings were more favorable for Icons than for Enclosures or Character Styles. In addition, Character Styles were consistently rated as being highly distracting for reading tasks. For visual search tasks, Character Styles yielded shorter search times (<i>p</i> < 0.05) as well as significantly more favorable salience ratings. Participants also preferred the Character Styles significantly more often than either Enclosures or Icons for locating linked words. The number of errors produced for both experiments was very low (less than 2%) and there were no significant differences in errors across Methods or Cues. This finding is not unexpected considering the low level of difficulty for the reading and search tasks. Based on the results of both experiments, Icons are the recommended Method for indicating linked words in hypertext documents. Icons provide moderate perceived readability (reflected in subjective ratings, though not in reading times or preferences), whereas Enclosures were not sufficiently salient and Character Styles were perceived to have degraded text readability. A discussion of a wide variety of techniques which either are currently used in existing hypertext systems or could potentially be used is included in the Literature Review section. The issue of trade-offs between Cue salience and obtrusiveness is addressed in the Discussion. / Master of Science

Cultural 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.