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The Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia brings together scholars, researchers, and practitioners from diverse disciplines to consider the form, role and impact of hypertext and hypermedia in a forum of discussion of ideas, design and use of hypertext and hypermedia in a variety of domains. The conference also considers the transformative power of hypermedia and its ability to alter the way we read, write, argue, work, exchange information and entertain ourselves.
The following articles are from "Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference":
Articles
p. 1-14
Zellweger, Polle T. (1989): Scripted Documents: A Hypermedia Path Mechanism. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 1-14.
“The concept of a path, or ordered traversal of some links in a hypertext, has been a part of the hypertext notion from its early formation. Although paths can help to solve two major problems with hypertext systems, namely user disorientation and high cognitive overhead for users, their value has not been recognized. Paths can also provide the backbone for computations over a hypertext, an important issue for the future of hypertext. This paper constructs a framework for understanding path mechanisms for hypertext and explores the basic issues surrounding them. Given this framework, it reviews path mechanisms that have been provided by other hypertext systems. Finally, it describes the Scripted Documents system, which has been developed to test the potential of one powerful path mechanism.”
Fischer, Gerhard, McCall, Raymond and Morch, Anders (1989): JANUS: Integrating Hypertext with a Knowledge-Based Design Environment. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 105-117.
“Hypertext systems and other complex information stores offer little or no guidance in helping users find information useful for activities they are currently engaged in. Most users are not interested in exploring hypertext information spaces per se but rather in obtaining information to solve problems or accomplish tasks. As a step towards this we have developed the JANUS design environment. JANUS allows designers to construct artifacts in the domain of architectural design and at the same time to be informed about principles of design and the reasoning underlying them. This process integrates two design activities: construction and argumentation. Construction is supported by a knowledge-based graphical design environment and argumentation is supported by a hypertext system. Our empirical evaluations of JANUS and its predecessors has shown that integrated support for construction and argumentation is necessary for full support of design.”
Hayes, Phil and Pepper, Jeff (1989): Towards an Integrated Maintenance Advisor. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 119-127.
p. 129-135
Shipman III, Frank M., Chaney, R. Jesse and Gorry, G. Anthony (1989): Distributed Hypertext for Collaborative Research: The Virtual Notebook System. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 129-135.
p. 137-146
Pearl, Amy (1989): Sun's Link Service: A Protocol for Open Linking. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 137-146.
“Sun's Link Service, a product shipped with Sun's programming in the large software development environment, the Network Software Environment, allows users to make and maintain explicit and persistent bidirectional relationships between autonomous frontend applications. The Link Service defines a protocol for an extensible and loosely coupled, or open, hypertext system. An interesting instance of this is the ability to link to objects in closed hypertext systems if they integrate with the Link Service. The Link Service addresses link maintenance and automated versioning. Link endpoints, or nodes, are defined by the integrating applications, and are not restricted to points, whole documents, or cards.”
Travers, Michael (1989): A Visual Representation for Knowledge Structures. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 147-158.
“Knowledge-based systems often represent their knowledge as a network of interrelated units. Such networks are commonly presented to the user as a diagram of nodes connected by lines. These diagrams have provided a powerful visual metaphor for knowledge representation. However, their complexity can easily become unmanageable as the knowledge base (KB) grows. This paper describes an alternate visual representation for navigating knowledge structures, based on a virtual museum metaphor. This representation uses nested boxes rather than linked nodes to represent relations. The intricate structure of the knowledge base is conveyed by a combination of position, size, color, and font cues. MUE (Museum Unit Editor) was implemented using this representation to provide a graphic front end for the Cyc knowledge base.”
Marshall, Catherine C. and Irish, Peggy M. (1989): Guided Tours and On-Line Presentations: How Authors Make Existing Hypertext Intelligible for Readers. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 15-26.
“Hypertext systems like NoteCards provide facilities for authoring large networks. But they provide little support for the associated task of making these networks intelligible to future readers. Presentation conventions may be imported from other related media, but because the conventions have not yet been negotiated within a community of hypertext readers and writers, they provide only a partial solution to the problem of guiding a reader through an existing network of information. In this paper, we will discuss how a recent facility, Guided Tours, has been used to organize hypertext networks for presentation. The use of Guided Tours in NoteCards has exposed a set of authoring issues, and has provided us with examples of solutions to the problems associated with on-line presentations.”
Yoder, Elise and Wettach, Thomas C. (1989): Using Hypertext in a Law Firm. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 159-167.
p. 169-180
DeYoung, Laura (1989): Hypertext Challenges in the Auditing Domain. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 169-180.
“Auditing is the process by which an opinion is formed on the financial statements of a company by a group of outside professional accountants. Large numbers of documents pertaining to the company's business are examined and many more are produced during an audit in order to arrive at and provide a basis for this opinion. These documents contain a wide variety of interrelated information. Capturing these interrelationships is essential to performing an effective audit. Currently, this is accomplished by using a highly-structured, manual hypertext system. While quite effective, the system is difficult and time-consuming to maintain, and can become unwieldy when conducting an audit for a very large company. We are in the process of developing an electronic system to meet the needs of this complex task. The complexity of the referencing system challenges current hypertext and user interface technology. At the same time, the structure of the domain affords an interesting application area within which to explore and more fully develop hypertext techniques. During the course of this project, we are exploring automatic generation of links, automatic generation of documents, hypertext path creation and access, creation of a typed-link topology for the domain, referencing of individual points and regions within documents, linking bodies of hypertext, and many other issues.”
Schnase, John L. and Leggett, John (1989): Computational Hypertext in Biological Modelling. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 181-197.
“This paper describes an application of hypertext to a biological research problem. An individual energetics model for Cassin's Sparrow was developed in which the computations and intellectual activities associated with each phase of the research were performed within an integrated hypertext environment. The study demonstrates the effectiveness of computational hypertext in meeting the personal information management requirements of individual researchers in the natural sciences and its ability to speed the dissemination of research results within a community of scholars. Most important, the study shows how hypertext can be "phased in" to support traditional scholarship in disciplines that are otherwise slow to respond to emerging computer technologies.”
Frisse, Mark E. and Cousins, Steve (1989): Information Retrieval from Hypertext: Update on the Dynamic Medical Handbook Project. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 199-212.
“This paper attempts to provide a perspective from which to develop a more complete theory of information retrieval from hypertext documents. Viewing hypertexts as large information spaces, we compare two general classes of navigation methods, classes we call local and global. We argue that global methods necessitate some form of "index space" conceptually separate from the hypertext "document space". We note that the architectures of both spaces effect the ease with which one can apply various information retrieval algorithms. We identify a number of different index space and document space architectures and we discuss some of the associated trade-offs between hypertext functionality and computational complexity. We show how some index space architectures can be exploited for enhanced information retrieval, query refinement, and automated reasoning. Through analysis of a number of prototype systems, we discuss current limitations and future potentials for various hypertext information retrieval structures.”
Croft, W. Bruce and Turtle, Howard (1989): A Retrieval Model for Incorporating Hypertext Links. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 213-224.
p. 225-237
Crouch, Donald B., Crouch, Carolyn J. and Andreas, Glenn (1989): The Use of Cluster Hierarchies in Hypertext Information Retrieval. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 225-237.
“The graph-traversal approach to hypertext information retrieval is a conceptualization of hypertext in which the structural aspects of the nodes are emphasized. A user navigates through such hypertext systems by evaluating the semantics associated with links between nodes as well as the information contained in nodes. In this paper we describe an hierarchical structure which effectively supports the graphical traversal of a document collection in a hypertext system. We provide an overview of an interactive browser based on cluster hierarchies. Initial results obtained from the use of the browser in an experimental hypertext retrieval system are presented.”
Nielsen, Jakob (1989): The Matters that Really Matter for Hypertext Usability. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 239-248.
“We compare 92 benchmark measurements of various usability issues related to hypertext which have been published in the hypertext literature in order to find which ones have shown the largest effects.”
DeRose, Steven J. (1989): Expanding the Notion of Links. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 249-257.
p. 259-267
Moulthrop, Stuart (1989): Hypertext and "the Hyperreal". In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 259-267.
p. 269-292
Consens, Mariano P. and Mendelzon, Alberto O. (1989): Expressing Structural Hypertext Queries in GraphLog. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 269-292.
“GraphLog is a visual query language in which queries are formulated by drawing graph patterns. The hyperdocument graph is searched for all occurrences of these patterns. The language is powerful enough to allow the specification and manipulation of arbitrary subsets of the network and supports the computation of aggregate functions on subgraphs of the hyperdocument. It can support dynamically defined structures as well as inference capabilities, going beyond current static and passive hypertext systems. The expressive power of the language is a fundamental issue: too little power limits the applications of the language, while too much makes efficient implementation difficult and probably affects ease of use. The complexity and expressive power of GraphLog can be characterized precisely by using notions from deductive database theory and descriptive complexity. In this paper, from a practical point of view, we present examples of GraphLog queries applied to several different hypertext systems, providing evidence for the expressive power of the language, as well as for the convenience and naturalness of its graphical representation. We also describe an ongoing implementation of the language.”
Furuta, Richard and Stotts, P. David (1989): Programmable Browsing Semantics in Trellis. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 27-42.
p. 293-304
Clitherow, Peter, Riecken, Doug and Muller, Michael J. (1989): VISAR: A System for Inference and Navigation in Hypertext. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 293-304.
“Hypertext systems have traditionally been constructed by hand. This process can stand improvement in several aspects: it is laborious; requires a human to understand the text and infer all the relationships between the concepts/topics; and while the resulting hypertext may be traversed by a reader in an arbitrary fashion, s/he may still find it difficult to understand the concepts as expressed by the builder of the hypertext. We present a knowledge-intensive assistant for building hypertext fragments from a knowledge base customised both explicitly and implicitly by a user. Such a presentation may clarify relationships between concepts that were present implicitly in multiple sources of information. In the domain of an intelligent information retrieval system, we show how such an assistant may render customised views of knowledge extracted in manageable form. While the presentation medium of the original system is graphic, we also speculate that presentation of the information in alternative hypermedia appears to be straightforward.”
Lesk, Michael E. (1989): What To Do When There's Too Much Information. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 305-318.
“Hypertext systems with small units of text are likely to drown the user with information, in the same way that online catalogs or bibliographic retrieval systems often do. Experiments with a catalog of 800,000 book citations have shown two useful ways of dealing with the "too many hits" problem. One is a display of phrases containing the excessively frequent words; another is a display of titles by hierarchical category. The same techniques should apply to other text-based retrieval systems. In general, interactive solutions seem more promising than attempts to do detailed query analysis and get things right the first time.”
Neuwirth, Christine and Kaufer, David S. (1989): The Role of External Representations in the Writing Process: Implications for the Design of Hypertext-Based Writing Tools. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 319-341.
“The long-range goal of the research reported here is to study the role of hypertext-based external representations in augmenting performance on a cognitively complex task, in particular, on a synthesis writing task. The production of a written synthesis is a challenging task that requires managing large amounts of information over an extended period of time. Thus, synthesis writing is a task that is well-suited for testing the potential of hypertext technologies to support work on complex tasks. From a case study of experts and novices, we have developed a theory of the cognitive processes involved in producing a written synthesis. We have also developed a preliminary theory of the role of external representations in the writing process. We have drawn upon these two theories to design several hypertext-based external representations that we believe will augment writers' performance on a written synthesis task. The hypertext-based applications include a general graph object and a table object; these objects form the foundation for a set of specialized tools to support synthesis writing, namely, a summary graph, synthesis grid and synthesis tree.”
Streitz, Norbert A., Hannemann, Jorg and Thuring, Manfred (1989): From Ideas and Arguments to Hyperdocuments: Travelling through Activity Spaces. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 343-364.
p. 365-378
Catlin, Timothy, Bush, Paulette and Yankelovich, Nicole (1989): InterNote: Extending a Hypermedia Framework to Support Annotative Collaboration. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 365-378.
“Based on three years of user feedback, a design team at IRIS embarked on a project to enhance Intermedia to better support small groups of collaborators, particularly those involved with document review and revision. Towards this end, we defined user-level requirements for the new functionality. The result of this process was the design and implementation of InterNote. One aspect of InterNote involves a fundamental extension to Intermedia's navigational linking paradigm. Instead of simply being able to traverse links, users are now also able to transfer data across the links using a technique we call warm linking. In this paper we describe extensions to our hypermedia framework to support annotative collaboration, including the user interface of the new linking functionality and the InterNote extension. Finally, we discuss our plans for future work.”
Akscyn, Robert, Halasz, Frank, Oren, Tim, Riley, Victor and Welch, Lawrence (1989): Interchanging Hypertexts. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 379-381.
p. 383-384
Joyce, Michael, Kaplan, Nancy, McDaid, John and Moulthrop, Stuart (1989): Hypertext, Narrative, and Consciousness. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 383-384.
“This panel attempts to initiate a dialogue on the implications of hypertext between information theorists and literary theorists, writers of texts and designers of text systems. Though the panelists base their views on several years of practical work with hypertext in education, they are concerned with broader social and conceptual problems raised by this technology -- its likely effect on the way we teach ourselves and others to understand texts and the way we use those texts to construct an orderly (or disorderly) world. It seems important to raise these issues at Hypertext'89 because hypertext is rapidly being recognized by humanists as a crucial and revolutionary enterprise. This recognition creates an opportunity for humanists and scientists to convene a productive dialogue which could have great significance both for hypertext and for the future of the humanities. We hope for a frank and free-ranging exchange of views and emphasize that this is a forum for questioning and controversy, not a series of monologues. Each panelist will deliver a ten-minute position statements, with the remaining hour of the session devoted to discussion. Abstracts of the three presentations follow.”
Rous, Bernard, Shneiderman, Ben, Yankelovich, Nicole and Yoder, Elise (1989): Lessons Learned from the ACM Hypertext on Hypertext Project. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 385-386.
p. 387-390
Bernstein, Mark, Critz, James, Mulvany, Nancy, Simpson, Rosemary M. and Leunen, Mary-Claire van (1989): Indexing and Hypertext. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 387-390.
p. 391-392
Bieber, Michael, Feiner, Steven K., Frisse, Mark, Hayes, Phil, Peper, Gerri and Scacchi, Walt (1989): Expert Systems and Hypertext. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 391-392.
p. 393
Ehrmann, Stephen C., Erde, Steven, Morrell, Kenneth and Weissman, Ronald F. E. (1989): Hypertext and Higher Education: A Reality Check. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. p. 393.
p. 395-396
Balzer, Robert, Begeman, Michael L., Garg, Pankaj K., Schwartz, Mayer and Shneiderman, Ben (1989): Hypertext and Software Engineering. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 395-396.
p. 397
Baird, Pat, Egan, Dennis E., Kintsch, Walter, Smith, John and Streitz, Norbert A. (1989): Cognitive Aspects of Designing Hypertext Systems. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. p. 397.
p. 399
Halasz, Frank, McCracken, Donald, Meyrowitz, Norman, Pearl, Amy and Shneiderman, Ben (1989): Confessions -- What's Wrong with Our Systems. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. p. 399.
p. 43-50
Parunak, H. Van Dyke (1989): Hypermedia Topologies and User Navigation. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 43-50.
“One of the major problems confronting users of large hypermedia systems is that of navigation: knowing where one is, where one wants to go, and how to get there from here. This paper contributes to this problem in three steps. First, it articulates a number of navigational strategies that people use in physical (geographical) navigation. Second, it correlates these with various graph topologies, showing how and why appropriately restricting the connectivity of a hyperbase can improve the ability of users to navigate. Third, it analyzes some common hypermedia navigational mechanisms in terms of navigational strategies and graph topology.”
Glushko, Robert J. (1989): Design Issues for Multi-Document Hypertexts. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 51-60.
p. 61-81
Perlman, Gary (1989): Asynchronous Design/Evaluation Methods for Hypertext Technology Development. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 61-81.
“A process model used in the design and evaluation of hypertext systems is discussed. The model includes asynchronous processes of task analysis, document analysis, literature survey and systems evaluation, interpretation of data, designing and building systems, and collecting data. For each process, experiences with NaviText SAM, a hypertext interface to a reference source, are discussed. A variety of new methods for evaluation of experimental systems are presented along with several empirical results.”
Evenson, Shelley, Rheinfrank, John and Wulff, Wendie (1989): Towards a Design Language for Representing Hypermedia Cues. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 83-92.
p. 93-104
Jordan, Daniel S., Russell, Daniel M., Jensen, Anne-Marie S. and Rogers, Russell A. (1989): Facilitating the Development of Representations in Hypertext with IDE. In: Halasz, Frank and Meyrowitz, Norman (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 89 Conference November 5-8, 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pp. 93-104.
“Hypertext systems are used for a variety of representational tasks, many that involve fairly formalized structures. Because hypertext systems are generally intended for developing informal (unstructured data) and semi-formal (semantic networks) structures, developing more formal structures can be difficult. Regular patterns in structures must often be recreated from primitive elements (individual nodes and links) resulting in a high overhead cost. In this paper we describe the Instructional Design Environment, or IDE, a hypertext system application that facilitates the rapid and accurate creation of regular network patterns in hypertext. IDE focuses on the task of instructional design, but its facilities are general and useful to many representation tasks. IDE features structure accelerators that provide simple menu interfaces to (1) define network structures out of patterns of typed node and link connections, (2) create new node types that contain structured content, and (3) tailor the interface for creating cards, links and structures to focus attention during different stages of the representation task. These mechanisms allow the user to tailor the hypertext environment to better meet his or her representational needs. We also report on the field use of IDE by instructional designers.”
We have decided to give away world-class educational materials
because we believe that universal access to high quality education is key to the building
of peace, sustainable social and economic development, and intercultural dialogue.
To calculate just have much we have saved you, our wonderful readers, we compare our free encyclopedia to two
books we love:
As you are reading our encyclopedia on your iPad/tablet (and saving a few trees), we estimate that the price would be $90 if sold as an eBook.
With that number, we can calculate how much money we have saved our readers, based on calculating the number of readers.
How we calculate readership
Because of our online and tablet/iPad approach to publishing, we are able to precisely measure reading behaviour across hundreds of parameters in realtime: Anything from reading
speed, drop-off points in the text, reader demographics, and much more.
Based on our server logs and the Google Analytics API,
we calculate the number of readers as described in the calculation method below.
A reader is not the same as a simple pageview and a reader is not the same as a
website visitor (as described in our calculation method below).
We calculate readership for two types of readers:
Readers that have read our whole encyclopedia, much the same way you read a printed book
Readers that have reader an individual chapter
Calcalution method: How we define a reader
First we use the Google Analytics API to get a report of the number of unique human visitors to a chapter/page. Google runs its business on ads and thus completely relies on the ability to distinguish between a human visitor and an automated request. If not, you could earn millions on automating clicks on Google Ads.
We then compare that number to our Apache webserver logs, which report the much higher number of actual visits to a chapter/page (both human and automated). We calculate the difference in percent, which we call an "exaggeration factor", which we use in step 6 below.
With a large part of the visitors excluded, we further exclude any visitor who:
has not remained on the page for at least 3 minutes (this factor is calculated by recording visit durations of 1000 randomly selected visitors) or has not printed the page (i.e. has not visited the printerfriendly version of the chapter/page)
has not scrolled the page (this factor is calculated by recording scroll movements on 1000 randomly selected visitors)
We then further exclude "double readers", i.e. readers who read a portion of a chapter and then returns in,
say, a week or a month to read the rest.
Although this person's reading activity spans multiple server sessions, the person is only counted as a single reader.
We categorize a "double reader" as a visitor who:
visits a page, or multiple pages, across multiple server sessions
qualifies to be defined as a reader, cf step 1-3 above, in all server sessions
uses the same originating IP address
We then subtract 5% from the final number to counter-balance a last remaining factor, namely the situation where one reader reads a chapter on his/her tablet
using a WiFi connection (and counted as one reader) but then picks up his other tablet using a 3G dongle
(with another IP address) and re-reads some of the chapter. That will equal two readers, not one. We have no way
of calculating how many times this situation arises, but to be on the safe side we subtract 5%
from the final number.
We then take half of the "exaggeration factor" from step 2 and substract from the final number. We do this for no rational reason. We do it only as a further measure to be certain that our number of readers is not inflated.
To qualify as a reader who has read our whole encyclopedia - much the same way you read a printed book - that person must have qualified as a reader (cf. 1-6 above) of at least 80% of the encyclopedia chapters.
As a result, we have eliminated everything from automated requests to the more casual visitors. That leaves us with what we can safely call readers.
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Authoritative overview of End-User Development (EUD) including 4 HD video interviews filmed in Rome, Italy. EUD is really all about democratization of computing.
