What's Eliza Doing in the Chinese Room. Incoherent Hyperdocuments and How toAvoid Them

摘要

Research on understanding linear texts has shown that comprehension andnavigation mainly depend on the reader's ability to construct a coherent mental representation. While the author of a traditional document can use a variety of structural cues to support his readers in building up such a representation, the author of a hyperdocument faces a new problem. If he wants to ensure that his readers understand the entire hyperdocument as a coherent entity, he needs means to indicate its structure in a comprehensible way. In the paper, the authors propose a construction kit which provides dedicated design objects for the purpose. The design objects can be characterized as building blocks for three functionally different components of a hyperdocument: its content part, organizational part, and presentation part. In addition to the design objects, the authors propose some design rules which should guide the construction of coherent hyperdocuments.