To date, hypertext and hypermedia research has principally studied the influence of separate features of hypermedia texts on information retrieval. By contrast, this thesis explores the meanings of hypermedia texts and the effects of these meanings on free website exploration. In particular, the study focuses on those meanings which can reveal how information is organised in websites and on the construal of such meanings through the interplay of hyperlinks, visual, verbal, audio and kinetic resources in generically hybrid hypermedia texts. This focus is motivated by research showing that understanding how information is organised in hypermedia texts is crucial for users' successful orientation within them. To achieve its aim, this research studies six websites for children and the navigation paths of fourteen children through one of them, and draws on interviews with the websites' producers and the children. The thesis connects the professional field of hypermedia design with systemic functional theory and systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF MDA). As a result, it offers two tools for hypermedia discourse analysis, which are based on and illustrated through the analyses of five of the websites. The first is the system of HYPERTEXTUAL DISTANCE. Designed to analyse the potential of hyperlinks to reveal, obscure or transcend the textual organisation of a website, this system is built by reconceptualising from a SF MDA perspective a central principle for organising information in websites - website hierarchy. The second tool is the framework for analysing logicosemantic relations in hypermedia. Its categories describe the ideational relations that hold together information presented on the same webpage or on different webpages, which may or may not be hyperlinked with each other. Through the analyses of the sixth website and the navigation paths through it, the thesis exemplifies how both tools, independently and together, can be employed to explore the interdependence of website design and navigation. The discussion of selected results from these analyses, supported by the views of the research participants, identifies ways in which the tools proposed in this thesis can be applied in hypermedia design, evaluation and literacy education and complemented with other tools for hypermedia discourse analysis.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/232643 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Djonov, Emilia Nikolaeva, School of English & School of Modern Language Studies, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of English and School of Modern Language Studies |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Emilia Nikolaeva Djonov,, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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