The Electronic Text

Poor design and a failure to consider the user often act against the effectiveness in online communication. Designing Usable Electronic Text, Second Edition explores the human issues that underlie information usage and stresses that usability is the main barrier to the electronic medium's campaign to gain mass acceptance. The book is a revision of the successful first edition with a new emphasis on the Web and hypertext design. With the emergence of new uses of information, such as e-commerce and telemedicine, text presentation will take on a new and greater importance. Focus on the design framework and an empirical approach make this a valuable guide to designing effective, user-friendly electronic text.

Introducing Electronic Text Analysis is a practical and much needed introduction to corpora – bodies of linguistic data. Written specifically for students studying this topic for the first time, the book begins with a discussion of the underlying principles of electronic text analysis. It then examines how these corpora enhance our understanding of literary and non-literary works. In the first section the author introduces the concepts of concordance and lexical frequency, concepts which are then applied to a range of areas of language study. Key areas examined are the use of on-line corpora to complement traditional stylistic analysis, and the ways in which methods such as concordance and frequency counts can reveal a particular ideology within a text. Presenting an accessible and thorough understanding of the underlying principles of electronic text analysis, the book contains abundant illustrative examples and a glossary with definitions of main concepts. It will also be supported by a companion website with links to on-line corpora so that students can apply their knowledge to further study. The accompanying website to this book can be found at http://www.routledge.com/textbooks/0415320216

The first comprehensive guide to explore the growing field of electronic information, The Text in the Machine: Electronic Texts in the Humanities will help you create and use electronic texts. This book explains the processes involved in developing computerized books on library Web sites, CD-ROMs, or your own Web site. With the information provided by The Text in the Machine, you?ll be able to successfully transfer written words to a digitized form and increase access to any kind of information. Keeping the perspectives of scholars, students, librarians, users, and publishers in mind, this book outlines the necessary steps for electronic conversion in a comprehensive manner. The Text in the Machine addresses many variables that need to be taken into consideration to help you digitize texts, such as: defining types of markup, markup systems, and their uses identifying characteristics of the written text, such as its linguistic and physical nature, before choosing a markup scheme ensuring accuracy in electronic texts by keying in information up to three times and choosing software that is compatible with the markup systems you are using examining the best file formats for scanning written texts and converting them to digital form explaining the delivery systems available for electronic texts, such as CD-ROMs, the Internet, magnetic tape, and the variety of software that will interpret these interfaces designing the structure of electronic texts with linear presentation, segmented text, or image files to increase readability and accessibility Containing lists of suggested readings and examples of electronic text Web sites, this book provides you with the opportunity to see how other libraries and scholars are creating and publishing digital texts. From The Text in the Machine, you?ll receive the knowledge to make this medium of information accessible and beneficial to patrons and scholars around the world.

This Companion offers a thorough, concise overview of the emerging field of humanities computing. Contains 37 original articles written by leaders in the field. Addresses the central concerns shared by those interested in the subject. Major sections focus on the experience of particular disciplines in applying computational methods to research problems; the basic principles of humanities computing; specific applications and methods; and production, dissemination and archiving. Accompanied by a website featuring supplementary materials, standard readings in the field and essays to be included in future editions of the Companion.

The electronic presentation of text has revolutionized the understanding and use of literary evidence. Formerly, readers and editors were obliged to choose one edition of a text in book form to work with and to treat other versions as ancillary. Now electronic editions of a text can incorporate all the various versions and revisions. This allows unconstrained access to a much greater range of information. This collection considers the role of computerized technology in contributing to the interpretation and editing of texts, from both practical and theoretical perspectives. The contributors investigate the ways in which the treatment of texts and the idea of a "text" are affected by current and prospective advances in electronic production and reproduction.

Poor design and a failure to consider the user often act against the effectiveness in online communication. Designing Usable Electronic Text, Second Edition explores the human issues that underlie information usage and stresses that usability is the main barrier to the electronic medium's campaign to gain mass acceptance. The book is a revision of the successful First Edition with a new emphasis on the Web and hypertext design and their impacts. With the emergence of new uses of information, such as e-commerce and telemedicine, text presentation will take on a new and greater importance. Its focus on the design framework and its empirical approach make it a unique book.

Electronic documents offer the possibility of presenting virtually unlimited amounts of information to readers in forms which can be rapidly searched and structured to suit their needs. However, poor design and a failure to consider the user often combine to compromise the realization of this potential.; In this book, Dillon examines the issues involved in designing usable electronic documents from the perspective of the designer. It examines the human issues underlying information usage and emphasizes the issue of usability as the main problem in the electronic medium's failure to gain mass acceptance. In an attempt to provide a relevant description of the reading process that supports a more informed view of the issues, a series of studies examining readers and their views as well as uses of texts is reported. The results lead to the proposal of a user-centred framework that provides a broad qualitative model of the important issues for designers to consider when developing an electronic document.; "Designing Usable Electronic Text" focuses attention on aspects that are central to usability, and concludes with an analysis of the likely uses of such a framework and the realistic potential for electronic documents.