notes

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[killing the book]  A passionate argument that is often found citing the archdeacon Frollo's proclamation, "Ceci tuera cela" (the book will kill the cathedral, the alphabet will kill images) from Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame. For an intelligent discussion of why technologies don't always supercede their predecessors see Paul Dugid's "Material Matters: The Past and Futurology of the Book" or Umberto Eco's afterward essay, both published in The Future of the Book (University of California Press, 1996).

nav	[25% slower]  J.D. Gould and N. Grischkowsky: "Doing the same work with hard copy and with cathode ray tube (CRT) computer terminals," (Human Factors 26, 1984).

nav	[increased CRT resolution]  J.D.Gould, L. Alfaro, R. Finn, B. Haupt, A. Minuto, and J. Salaun: "Why reading was slower from CRT displays than from paper," (Proceedings of ACM CHI+GI'87, April 1987).

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[high fidelity video displays]  P. Wright and A. Lickorish: "Proof-reading texts on screen and paper," (Behavior and Information Technology, 1983). See also the more frequently cited; J.D. Gould and N. Grischkowsky: "Doing the same work with hard copy and cathode ray tube (CRT) computer terminals," (Human Factors 26, 1984).

nav	[Muriel Cooper]  Ms. Cooper died on May 26, 1994. See http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/tt/1994/jun01/36701.html for an obituary published by MIT Tech Talk. The fate of the VLW was not determined until a much later date.

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[information design]  A reasonable definition of information design can be borrowed from Richard Saul Wurman's definition of an information architect: "the individual who organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear..." (Information Architects, Graphis, 1997.) I prefer the term information design because architect places an unnecessary emphasis on the spatial aspects of design.

nav	[lexia]  Roland Barthes in S/Z (R. Miller [trans.], Hill and Wang, 1970) defines lexia as "units of reading." Later authors, such as George Landow (Hypertext in Hypertext, Johns Hopkins UP, 1993), have mutated the term to mean a "text chunk" or an atomic unit of thought as described by a hypertext.

nav	[information theory]  A valuable text, written primarily from an information theory perspective, is Frank Smith's Understanding Reading: A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Reading and Learning to Read (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971).

nav	[waterfall effect]  The waterfall effect is described in R.L. Gregory's Eye and Brain 2e 1973, McGraw Hill New York. Thanks to Erik Viirre M.D. Ph.D. a Research Scientist at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory located at the University of Washington for help finding this reference.

nav	[RSVP]  Suguru Ishizaki of Carnegie Mellon University has a good site located at http://www.cmu.edu/cfa/design/kdg/kt/ that provides an introduction to Rapid Serial Visual Presentations and other more artistic applications of Kinetic Typography.

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[modality shifting]  One model for approaching the various cognitive modalities of on-screen reading is presented in Andrew Dillon's "TIMS: A Framework for the Design of Usable Electronic Text," (Cognitive Aspects of Electronic Text Processing, van Oostendorp & de Mul [ed.], Ablex Publishing, 1996).

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[typography]  Studies claiming to objectively define rules for typographical readability are so conflicting (and are often limited to print media), that I've chosen to be purposely vague in this instance. See Paul Muter's "Interface Design and Optimization of Reading Continuous Text" (Cognitive Aspects of Electronic Text Processing, van Oostendorp & de Mul [ed.], Ablex Publishing, 1996) or Ben Shneiderman's Designing the User Interface (Addison Wesley, 1993, pp. 422 - 444) for references and a more complete discussion of readability factors.

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[eye movements]  There is an entire taxonomy of terms used to describe eye movements during reading -- defining them here would only confuse the notion that my system utilizes a much more limited set of eye movements and thus may require a longer accommodation period for older readers who are more set in their ways.

nav	[cursor]  Future versions will provide contextual feedback by displaying an open hand cursor when the mouse enters the throttle button zone and a closed hand cursor while the throttle control is active.

nav	[printing]  The behavior is common enough that Wired magazine once defined the moniker Gutenberg as: "A person who insists on printing out everything available onscreen," in its Jargon Watch column (November 1997, page 92).

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[user testing]  The need for realistic user testing may seem obvious, but of the interface designs presented at CHI'97, a prestigious computer-human interactions conference, "only nine [out of] 83 projects compared worker's performance on real tasks using the new interface with their current way of doing things. Four offered no gains at all." (W.W. Gibbs: "Taking Computers to Task," Scientific American, July 1997, p. 89).

nav	[19]  See the November 3rd issue of Information Week for an excerpt from Don Tapscott's upcoming Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation. (McGraw-Hill, 1998).

nav	[20]  E.B. Huey: The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading (MIT Press, 1908/68).

nav	[21]  See Todd Oppenheimer's distressing review of education's love affair with high-technology: "The Computer Delusion," (The Atlantic Monthly, July 1997, pp.45-62).

nav	[22]  Donald A. Norman: Things That Make Us Smart, (Addison-Wesley, 1993).