What's Eliza doing in the Chinese room? Incoherent hyperdocuments---and how to avoid them
Manfred Thüring, Jörg M. Haake, Jörg Hannemann · 1991
Research on understanding linear texts has shown that comprehension and navigation 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 this paper, we propose a construction kit which provides dedicated design objects for this 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, we propose some design rules which should guide the construction of coherent hy~rdocuments.