Contexts For Electronic Book Research 2: Interface and design
The design of computer interfaces for researchers working with electronic texts requires a combination of specialist areas of inquiry, including the ethnographic study of information-seeking behaviors, diagnostic performance evaluation of existing interfaces, and iterative design and usability study of new design prototypes (Ruecker, 2003). Some interfaces are intended to provide researchers and others with access to collections of materials. Others aim to facilitate research tasks once an appropriate subset of materials has been selected by the user. One of our goals is to bring together expertise in the necessary areas in order to inform the design of new affordances (Gibson, 1979) for people working with digital texts.
An affordance is an opportunity for action, and the design of a new digital affordance provides people with a tool that was not previously available. An example of a widely successful new digital affordance is the cut-and-paste function, which had not been available to writers using typewriters, but was adopted wholesale by everyone using word processors. As soon as the technology was able to support it, people learned that it was available, and a function that had not been possible became indispensable. An example of a new digital affordance that is not yet widely available is the dynamic table of contents (Ruecker, 2005), which would allow the reader to perform a variety of research tasks by interactively adding or subtracting content.
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