Assessing Scholarly Texts
by Allison Warner
This article is a substantial one, so I've included a few key quotations below. Do these assessment criteria help you to imagine your web-text more clearly?
Structural Design
Content Relationship
Navigational Design
Link Strategy
Node Strategy
Visual Design
Mutlimedia Incorporation
Structural Design
Multilinearity is one of the defining characteristics that distinguish a print-based text from a web-based text. An online text that incorporates a multi-linear structure—a structure comprised of multiple nodes with multiple pathways of access to those nodes—allows readers to choose their own paths through the text.
Structural Design
Content Relationship
Navigational Design
Link Strategy
Node Strategy
Visual Design
Mutlimedia Incorporation
Form/Content Relationship:
In a web-based text, by virtue of active participation in selecting links, readers are forced to look at the structure or form of the text rather than through it and to consider how the form is part of the message. According to Bolter (1991), if the form does not contribute to or enhance the message, but merely presents the content in a generic way, then the formal design is a waste of the new writing space afforded by the medium. A formal or form-based enactment of the content occurs when the organizational structure of the web-based text demonstrates and/or reinforces the content of the text.
Structural Design
Content Relationship
Navigational Design
Link Strategy
Node Strategy
Visual Design
Mutlimedia Incorporation
Navigation design
Authors of hypertextual pieces, such as webtexts, are challenged to find ways to orient readers in order to help them read efficiently and find their way around the text (Landow, 1989). Readers can become “lost in hyperspace”—a disorienting experience in which readers cannot determine where they are in relation to the information contained in the text, or how to return to a previously viewed node or find a node they think exists (Conklin, 1987). A significant method for enhancing reader orientation includes the incorporation of an overview or introductory node, textual or graphical webviews, and explicit navigation directions—instructions for moving through the text.
Link Strategy
Structural Design
Content Relationship
Navigational Design
Link Strategy
Node Strategy
Visual Design
Mutlimedia Incorporation
Links make possible the unique contextualization afforded by the online medium. Linking to external primary source material on the Web as well as internal contextualizing nodes can potentially enrich a reading of a text by offering additional layers of information for readers at varying levels of knowledge and interest in the subject. Regardless of where the links lead, readers are much more likely to view contextualizing material when it is easily and readily accessible by simply activating a link (Landow, 1989). The link is the main vehicle for movement within a web-based text. Clear navigation design is dependent upon the construction of an effective link strategy so that readers have informed options for moving through the text.
Structural Design
Content Relationship
Navigational Design
Link Strategy
Node Strategy
Visual Design
Mutlimedia Incorporation
Node strategy
From several web usability studies conducted in the late 90s, Jakob Nielsen and John Morkes (1998) concluded that substantial differences exist between reading from the screen and reading print from a page; hypertext authors attuned to these differences can take steps to enhance the reading experience. For example, Nielson and Morkes found that screen reading is slower than page reading; readers prefer to scan rather than read word for word from the screen; and readers prefer viewing short segments of text rather than scrolling through pages of text. A web-writing convention that has emerged from these reading analyses involves the process of “chunking” or separating content into small sections or nodes, which according to Nielsen, Morkes and others, provides a more reader-friendly experience within this medium.
Structural Design
Content Relationship
Navigational Design
Link Strategy
Node Strategy
Visual Design
Mutlimedia Incorporation
Visual design
As with navigation design, decisions regarding the visual design of a web-based text—including the manipulation of elements such as typography and color—depend on the goals of the text and the perceived needs of the reader. In other words, an effective visual design can support and enhance the meaning of the text; visual elements can be used rhetorically to gain the adherence of readers. Karen Chauss argued in “Reader as User: Applying Interface Design Techniques to the Web,” (incidentally, Kairos’s first Best Webtext award recipient), that the unique interface abilities afforded by the online medium require responsible use: “When writing for electronic media, writers can incorporate an array of graphic elements with greater ease than for print media. Lack of experience, coupled with ease of inclusion, can make for some wildly designed sites which distract rather than support the user.” Furthermore, as Pullman (2006) acknowledged, the new responsibilities for web authors necessitate judgment that may not be adequately cultivated: “Twenty years ago page layout and text design were the purview of graphic artists and printers; specialists with specialized knowledge.” Visual design, or “visual rhetoric” as it is referred to within the relevant literature, offers a broad range of information regarding the effective manipulation of typography, color, and layout.
Structural Design
Content Relationship
Navigational Design
Link Strategy
Node Strategy
Visual Design
Mutlimedia Incorporation
Multimedia incorporation
The ability to incorporate multiple media within a text is, without question, the most significant allowance of the online medium that cannot be replicated in print. The inclusion of audio streams, for example, either in presenting content or providing background sound can arguably add dimension to an otherwise single-sensory text. Similarly, the incorporation of animation, advanced graphics, or video streams can affect the reception of an argument based on a potentially charged pathetic appeal.Hypertext critics commonly acknowledge that, because of the use of the hypertextual and/or hypermedia allowances of the medium, web-based texts demand new writing and reading strategies (Bolter, 1991; Lanham, 1993; Carter, 1997; Landow, 1997; Walker, 2006). These new strategies point toward non-textual ways of making meaning. For example, the ability for form to enact content within a web-based text suggests that formal design shares a semiotic role. Additionally, the advent of new media texts—online texts in which the written word is not the “primary rhetorical means”—changes the ways in which readers and writers understand and construct these texts (Ball, 2004). These new forms require readers to understand how non-textual elements combine with text to make meaning. The primary meaning-making methods in web-based texts fall into four categories: (1) purely textual, in which the meaning is derived solely from the text; (2) textual supplemented with visual elements that may enhance the meaning of the text; (3) textual combined with visual and other non-textual elements—video, audio, animation—that enhance the meaning of the webtext; and (4) textual combined with non-textual elements that comprise, or present, the meaning of the webtext.
Structural Design
Content Relationship
Navigational Design
Link Strategy
Node Strategy
Visual Design
Mutlimedia Incorporation
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