1b.i User studies and usability assessment

The wide adoption of "use" as a descriptor for engagement with hypermedia reflects the challenges inherent in understanding and facilitating interaction with complex, multimedia artifacts. It also points to a potential problem with research in this area: when we attempt to accommodate the digital artifact?s complexity by devising terms like "use," which synthesize the range of processes involved in human-computer interaction, does that deter us from realizing the distinctiveness of those processes?

One component of our research will entail close examination of how literary structures and reading processes are extended and modified in digital environments. As many theorists have observed, a close look at modern print and electronic texts reveals a shift away from conventional narrative logic, and toward indeterminacy, fragmentation, and open-endedness (e.g., Landow, 1997; Bolter, 2001; Van Peer and Chatman, 2001). At the same time, current theories concerning how readers engage with texts tend to be derived from studies of readers working with "normal" prose or other conventional narratives (e.g., Chatman, 1978; Rabinowitz, 1987; Kintcsh, 1988; Zwaan, Magliano, & Graesser, 1995).

Many contemporary models of reading are built on the premise that the act of reading relies in a large part on distinguishing between significant and insignificant narrative details, so that we may generate a workable mental model of the situation described in the text. The Construction-Integration Model proposed by Kintsch (1988), for example, describes a process whereby readers construct meaning by identifying potentially relevant elements; they then develop an integration system in which appropriate elements are strengthened and inappropriate elements are weakened or discarded. Chatman (1978, p. 53 ff.) likewise proposes that readers of fiction distinguish kernels (major events) from satellites (minor events). And Rabinowitz (1987) suggests that in making sense of narrative readers follow rules of notice, which he describes as a process of identifying more significant details and separating them from less significant details.

Miall and Kuiken (1994) have critiqued models such as this, particularly Kintsch?s. They point out that such models fail to take into account the extent to which readers? experiences of literary texts are modified by their emotional response to stylistically emphasized language, such as metaphor and alliteration, which engages the reader's feelings and evokes "less prototypic, more personal meanings" (p. 339). According to Miall and Kuiken, understanding literary response requires a different mode of analysis from the one implicit in text theories that have been developed based on studies of "normal" (i.e., informational) prose. These models, they note, generally describe "a resource-limited system in which cognitive structures (e.g., story grammars) or procedures (e.g., integrating processes) economize comprehension by deleting irrelevant propositions, inferring relevant propositions, and building macropropositions" (p. 344). In other words, they focus on how comprehension is facilitated or economized. In this respect, Miall and Kuiken argue that the current models are too limited for the purpose of understanding response to literature, because the essence of literary text dwells at least in part in its stylistic features, and these features are less likely to economies comprehension than to complicate it "by challenging the familiar, prototypic concepts that readers initially apply to the text" (p. 344). Even theories of the reading process based on studies of readers' engagement with literature, such as Chatman's and Rabinowitz's, tend to be biased toward a focus on economizing comprehension. Rabinowitz's notion that readers engage in a process of distinguishing significant elements from less significant elements, for example, clearly privileges plot over other features of narrative, presuming that anything in the text not immediately relevant to developing the situation is marginal to understanding the text.

This view of literary reading is problematic, particularly when we consider that much contemporary fiction, both print and digital, is increasingly complex and fails to conform to conventional expectations respecting narrative logic. Van Peer and Chatman (2001) observe that the diverse narratives of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are incompatible with existing narrative models. This is in part because most of these models reflect a western perspective, and in part because the models do not take into account new media genres. To develop appropriate models of reading complex print or digital narratives, we must examine how people engage these texts, and revise our perspectives of narrative structure and literary reading processes.

In discussing empirical research related to how people engage books and e-books, then, we envisage two scenarios: 1) venues in which economizing comprehension is the aim; and 2) venues in which engagement with an aesthetic artifact is the aim.

With respect to the first, information-seeking in the humanities is a well-researched area (e.g., Dalton and Charnigo, 2004). Nevertheless, our understanding of how humanities scholars engage computer-based information resources is in continual need of refinement as new resources are developed. An overview of research in this area is provided below.

With respect to the second scenario mentioned above, models of reading based on observing readers of complex print narratives, or emerging hypermedia genres, do not yet exist. Further, Douglas (2000) has questioned whether there are even a dozen "studies or considerations of how hypertext may transform the way we read or write texts, and, indeed, our whole conception of a satisfactory reading experience" (p. 73) In this assessment, Douglas disregards empirical studies of informational hypertext from the perspectives of interface design and software engineering. But her point is well taken, and is still valid in spite of the intervening years since she first made this observation: there exist few examinations of how reading processes may change when readers interact with complex digital genres such as hyperfiction. Members of our research team have worked to fill this significant lacuna in the literature (e.g., Dobson & Miall, 1998; Miall & Dobson, 2001; Dobson & Luce-Kapler, 2005; Luce-Kapler and Dobson, 2005; Dobson, 2006), but much research remains to be done, and appropriate models of reading are still in need of development.

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