Current research
Overview
Authors augment their texts using devices such as bold and italic
typeface to signal important information to the reader; these are
called typographical text signals. Reading research has shown that such
signals have a modest, positive effect on readers' recall and
comprehension of what they have read. Typically, text signals are an
example of a signal designed by one person, the author, to have some
effect on others, the readers. However,
some signals emerge through the unplanned, indirect, and collective
efforts of a group of individuals. Paths emerge in parks without having
been designed by anyone. Objects accumulate wear patterns that signal
how others have interacted with the object. Social bookmarking and
tagging websites allow a large, anonymous collective to generate and
then select out tags (keywords) that denote what a resource is about
or useful for. Digital text and
the
large-scale collaboration made possible through the internet provide an
opportunity to examine how unplanned, social text signals could
emerge in a text by aggregating the individual annotations produced by
a collective of readers. CoREAD, a social annotation application, was
designed
using a self-organizing (complex) systems perspective to enable
such social text signalling. Using this software it
is
possible to examine if and how social text signals emerge and
what effects they have on readers.
Funding
I currently have two related research projects: one is funded
internally and the other externally as indicated below.
| Funding
source |
Project
details |
| Research
Incentive Grant provided by Athabasca University |
RIG |
| Insight Development Grant
from SSHRC (2011-2013) |
IDG |
|
