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Forepaper by
for Messenger
Morphs the Media 99
Greetings - I applaud the hopeful workshop title: the
media *need* morphing and I am thrilled to see the progress
brought about by many evangelists for hypertext writing and
systems design. Thank you in particular to Deena Larsen and
Rob Kendall for organizing and hosting (respectively) this
particular e-collection of papers. - Julianne
(julianne@trellix.com
OR
jchat@world.std.com)
Making Users Work via S l o w
Reading
I. Definitions
Since the last workshop I have been s l o w l y reading
Espen Aarseth's Cybertext. In fact, I'm still
wrestling with the first page, where he uses the neologism
"ergodic" to describe texts that make their users "work" to
select or follow a "path" (the two Greek roots of the new
word). Aarseth invites us to use his new words "in any way
you find pleasurable." I'll gratefully use "ergodic" and
"cybertext" as he defines them, and also offer a small
quibble in regard to the former: the second root "path",
hodos, might get overlooked. Anyone who wants to
emphasize the second root could emphasize its presence with
an h: erghodic.
I am also employing "users" as Aarseth does, a term
"suggesting both active participation and
dependency."[1] Not only does this usage
avoid issues related to the term "reader," but as a 20-year
veteran of (software & hardware) product development I
welcomed this concept as an old friend - "both active
participation and dependency" describes my "users"
perfectly.
In last year's workshop it was useful to assume that
there was such a thing as "user expectations" in confronting
fiction (cybertext and otherwise). Each literate culture has
a pool of "user expectations" in regard to text, which
cybertexts may sometimes violate. Further, as more
cybertexts are created and used, some users are developing
"user expectations" in regard to cybertexts as a whole,
which any particular cybertext may violate.
I use the term "attention" as defined by Simone Weil,
Iris Murdoch, Hazel Henderson and others. (That's another
paper!)
Finally I would like to register the term "playable",
which I first heard used by Chris Crawford in discussing his
game Balance of Power. His original design for this
game had 60+ countries acting independently according to
their own interests. However he found this was "unplayable."
His choice of a structure with a duel between two
superpowers was a fall-back choice based on the fact that
his first (more realistic) system was too hard for users to
work with and enter into. From this discussion I infer that
calling a cybertext "playable" is an artistic judgement as
to whether the text makes it possible to use it (participate
in it and depend on it, as above) with some degree of
pleasure.
II. Why This Topic Interests Me
The year I was 17, struggling to express myself within a
narrow-minded cult, my then-boyfriend rebuked me
[2] during one of our
homework-session-dates. He said that my ability to read
quickly was a "gift from Satan," because it allowed me "to
be lazy." Reader, I dumped him (as Jane Eyre might say), but
I have become very interested in the question he obliquely
raised.
Actually, in addition to being able to skim like the
devil, I enjoy several kinds of slow reading, all the way
from reading-slowed-down-a-bit, which is analogous to paying
more for organic vegetables, to
almost-memorizing-on-the-spot, which involves, like moving
to a farm and growing all one's own food, intense amounts of
both effort and satisfaction. I began wondering whether
there were ways (other than writing superbly well - not
available to all) to invite or strongly compel other readers
to slow down and in the process improve their attention
skills.
On a banal level, this may be just one more attempt to
grab the reader's eyeballs for longer. On an apocalyptic
level, as our lives continue to speed up, the ability to be
truly attentive grows ever more refreshing to its
practitioners. Attention skills gained in reading can be
used to be fully present in other parts of life as well.
III. Questions
- - What are all the possible types of slow and fast
reading, from (say) skimming to exegesis and/or
memorization? [3]
- - What are the implications (for the user) of each
type?
- - Are there ever benefits (again, for the user) in
reading slowly?
- - Are there ways to make a user read slowly, or at
least suggest or tempt a user to do so?
- - If there are such ways, what are they and how do
they work?
- - I assume that "making a user read slowly" is not
identical to ergodic aka "making a reader work", but what
is the relationship between these two? Is "slow reading"
perhaps a subset of "working"?
IV. Assumptions & Experiments
- Slow Can Be Fun. As I enjoy slow reading in
certain circumstances, so I assume there may be benefit to
others, and would like to investigate this as my resources
permit.
- We Know How to Speed Things Up. For years I have
been paid to help users read nonfiction faster (or apprehend
multimedia faster, or learn faster, or view diagrams
faster...). At present I am helping to create hypertext
writing software that has as one of its designated goals to
help users skim large texts. Much is known
[4] about factors that help users read more
quickly (and in fact I am using the commonest such factors,
titles and headings and summaries, in this piece).
- Can We Just Reverse Things? One of the easy,
commercial ways to help users read faster is to find out
what their expectations are and then make sure the text
(plus helps if any) meets them. I am wonderfing whether
systematically violating user expectations would produce a
playable slow reading.
In Practice / What I'm Doing...
My attempt at violating all possible user expectations at
once was not playable, producing work indistinguishable from
inept, amateurish hypertext. (grin) Therefore I decided to
choose just two expectations to violate in a systematic way
[5]. I am now working on three versions of
a short fictional hypertext. The same lexias exist in all
three versions. My plan is to bring the three versions to
some sort of "first draft completion" state (I can hear you
all laughing - with me I hope) and solicit feedback from
hypertext users. I will report on this, with URLs for the
three versions, in my afterpaper.
- The sigma version is optimized for skimming (of the
whole) as well as deep reading (of the individual sections).
- The omicron version is like sigma but with link titles
that are clearly misleading [6].
- The omega version is like sigma but with different
material linked, in an attempt "not to link the obvious," an
idea borrowed with permission from Markku Eskelinen.
All are in Trellix so they can be used with or without a
bird's-eye-view map of all the lexia (although not all the
links).
Problems Being Non-Obvious
Once I decided "not to link the obvious," I realized that
"obvious" could mean any of the following: (i) lexia
that users would be most likely to want to read next, in the
author's opinion; (ii) lexia with closely related content;
(iii) lexia that are strongly related to the current lexia
in terms of the structure of the hypertext; (iv) lexia
provided to maximize user control and pleasure. It's proving
hard to avoid the third type of obviousness without changing
the structure of the hypertext, which (as was discussed last
year) often is the plot. I am hoping some clarity
will emerge as I continue working.
V. Acknowledgements & Extra Credit Reading
Last year, Deena Larsen introduced me to
questions
about closure. Perhaps in some texts with a structure
less well defined than that of Deena's Stone Moons
(forthcoming from Eastgate), the pleasurable feeling of
achievement one gets after doing a lot of effortful reading
might substitute for the thrill of closure. We'll see...
Markku Eskelinen tossed out the idea of
not-linking-the-obvious during a speech at HT98. Tempting
users into slow reading isn't the kind of temporal
manipulation Markku has in mind, as evidenced by "A Node Is
Still A Node Is Still A Node" (recently moved to
http://www.kolumbus.fi/mareske/page14.html)
, and his paper "Omission impossible: the ergodics of time"
for Digital Arts and Culture - organized by this workshop's
Jill Walker - sounds like it was great! -
(http://cmc.hf.uib.no/dac/papers/eskelinen.h
tml). However, if he does succeed in getting nodes to
morph and/or expireaccording to temporal criteria, we'll
need our attentive reading skills.
See you all in the workshop!
Footnotes
[1] "...suggesting both..." is from page
174, Johns Hopkins, c. 1997.
[2] For this relationship, I offer in
extenuation my youth, hormones, and the fact that he was
practically the only other cult member my age (locally).
For years now I have been examining the 'loony'
pronouncements of my fellow cult members and trying to
figure out the extent to which they might be meaningful. I
use the method often recommended by Suzette Haden Elgin
(paraphrased): assume the statement is true, and then try to
figure out what it might be true of. The most
interesting exercise was a study of a statement by my
grandfather, an aerospace engineer, that "God blew up the
space shuttle [Challenger]." Maybe I'll post that one.
Growing up in a cult, while trying to 'pass' in normal
society, requires one to maintain and act according to
mutually contradictory goals and beliefs. As described by
Sara Ruddick in Maternal Thinking (Ballantine, c.
1989), the specific "practice" of "mothering" places even
more dramatic demands on the parts of the brain that grapple
with contradiction (e.g. must work to keep child safe AND
must support child's autonomous exploration AND so on). Last
year we discussed the way "hypertexts often 'feel realer'
than linear narratives"; could this be in part because
hypertexts are more effective than linears at letting their
users wrestle among chunks of content that contradict one
another? I assume that work has already been done in this
area and I just don't know about it; would appreciate
suggestions for further exploration...
[3] To give just one example, the slowest
reading I can think of is where one memorizes the text as
one reads, or before moving "on" (whatever that means) to
the "next" portion (ditto). When I have done this it
produced breathtaking effects. I often practice something
similar but short of full memorization. "What is the point
of using a text, unless I let it enter into myself?"
User observations indicate that slow and fast reading are
frequently combined. For example, a typical session on the
world wide web might involve skimming (ultrafast reading) to
get to what one is interested in, followed by slower and
more focused reading/digestion of the interesting parts. For
an applied or commercially oriented presentation of this
type of finding, oriented towards nonfiction web content,
see the publications of User Interface Engineering
(www.uie.com).
[4] For overviews of
commercially-applicable tests of factors that affect
reading, see the archive of articles by Jakob Nielsen
(www.useit.com); his
recent work on comprehension is also interesting. See also
the "Usable Web" links maintained by Keith Instone
(www.usableweb.com).
A combination of academic and industry work on this can be
found in the proceedings of our sister SIG, ACM-SIG for
Computer-Human Interaction. The SIG name stays that way for
sake of pronunciation, although many of us prefer to call
the field of study HCI (putting the human first), "human
factors," and so on.
[5] These also involved assumptions,
because I'm talking about "user expectations for
cybertext" and as everyone knows these expectations are
rapidly and constantly evolving. However, putting theory
aside for a moment, I came up with several possible user
expectations to violate:
- - users assume that each element of the cybertext was
intended by the author for some reason - "there must be a
point to all this" - often an erroneous assumption
- - some users expect that they will be able to use
cues such as names, locations, and times (where these are
mentioned) to build mental models across lexia involving
chronology, identity of speakers, and so on
- - users expect that the names (labels) of links bear
some relation to the material in the lexia being linked
to
- - users expect that the links offered will be to the
"obvious" lexia (see Problems Being Non-Obvious, above)
[6] Clearly misleading (as opposed to
"vague") means that they are clear in what they imply, but
misleading as to the content they are linking to. Example: a
link called "In the Casino, At Twilight" that leads to a
dialogue that takes place neither in a casino nor at
twilight.
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