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It has been suggested that the presence of hyperlinks embedded into Web pages has a negative infuence upon reading behaviour on the Web (Nielsen, 1999; Carr, 2010).We conducted a study where participants were asked to read edited Wikipedia articles while their eye-movement behaviour was recorded. Target words (high or low frequency) were embedded in sentences and either displayed as hyperlinks (coloured in blue) or as normal text. A prior control study on the same subjects ensured that colouring target words outside of a Wikipedia/Web context had no influence upon reading behaviour. Participants were asked to read for comprehension but were unable to click any links. Analyses demonstrated that hyperlinks had no early effects on reading behaviour but re-reading increased when the target word was a hyperlink and low frequency. In all likelihood, the suggestion of additional information concerning the target word (i.e. hyperlinking to other explanatory Web pages) combined with its lexical difficulty (i.e. low frequency) caused our participants to re-analyse previous text sections

Power and influence in the blogosphere can be elusive in nature yet they still play a perceived role in determining future events. Cases like the resignation of Senator Trent Lott and the Dan Rather scandal have been quoted as evidence of the power of blogs, highlighting the potential role of blogs as a new medium for instigating change. However, supporting evidence of power in the blogosphere is often anecdotal. Over the past century, power definitions have been continuously debated amongst political scientists. Based on their theories, this paper defines power as the ability to produce effects among others when making decisions. The blogosphere's emergence echoes the phenomena of 17th century pamphleteering, where the invention of the printing press had facilitated publishing beyond institutional control such as churches and the monarchy. In Web Science, power in the blogosphere fits in as one of the issues that emerge due to the macro nature of the blogosphere. Previous work on identifying power and influence has resulted in papers positioning blogs within a hierarchy, based on metrics such as links, comments and phrases. These metrics are constrained by what can be observed. Moreover, quantifying power would involve finding a tractable, concrete link between blog activity and an action. External influences such as traditional media also make it difficult to correctly analyze blogs-to-action correlations. Nonetheless, the use of data propagation could be suitable to measure power. One potential methodology is to correlate blog trends to a tractable action like an e-petition.

LifeGuide is a software package that allows health professionals and researchers with no programming skills to easily and flexibly create, evaluate and modify behavioural interventions. An intervention called the ‘Internet Doctor’ was developed as a way of identifying many of the tools that were required in LifeGuide. The ‘Internet Doctor’ provides people suffering from cold and flu symptoms with tailored advice for the self-care of cold and flu symptoms. Participants were automatically randomised to one of two versions of the website: (i) the full, ‘more interactive’ version, or, (ii) a ‘less interactive’ version which omitted references to the Internet Doctor and links to obtain further information. Participants who viewed the less interactive version were more likely to complete the full consultation cycle for their selected symptom and were also more likely to consult for more symptoms than those in the less interactive version. Few participants clicked on the optional links in the more interactive version. It is concluded that although the more interactive version of the website provided more information, participants did not make full use of the interactive features which displayed this information, and did not consult for as many symptoms, so may not have benefited from the website as much as those viewing the less interactive version.

Scientific journals can capture a scholar’s research career. A researcher’s publication data often reflects his/her research interests and their social relations. It is demonstrated that scientist collaboration networks can be constructed based on co-authorship data from journal papers. The problem with such a network is that researchers are limited within their professional social network. This work proposes the idea of constructing a researcher’s social network based on data harvested from metadata of scientific publications and personal online profiles. We hypothesize that data, such as, publication keywords, personal interests, the themes of the conferences where papers are published, and co-authors of the papers, either directly or indirectly represent the authors’ research interests, and by measuring the similarity between these data we are able to construct a researcher social network. Based on the four types of data mentioned above, social network graphs were plotted, studied and analyzed. These graphs were then evaluated by the researchers themselves by giving ratings. Based on this evaluation, we estimated the weight for each type of data, in order to blend all data together to construct one ideal researcher’s social network. Interestingly, our results showed that a graph based on publication’s keywords were more representative than the one based on publication’s co-authorship. The findings from the evaluation were used to propose a dynamic social network data model.

Within the field of health care education, simulation is used increasingly to provide students with opportunities to develop their clinical skills (Alnier, 2006), often occurring in specially designed facilities with audio-video capture of student performance. The video capture enables analysis and assessment of student performance and or competence, the analysis of events (DiGiacomo et al, 1997), processes (Ram et al, 1999), and Objective Clinical Examinations (Humphris and Kaney, 2000 ; Vivekananda-Scmidt et al, 2007). However, from the student perspective, one of the most important components of simulation is the quality of the feedback on their performance. Practical considerations limit the potential use of video in debriefing students immediately after simulation. It may only be possible to video replay the whole simulation or skip to segments of interest,requiring the facilitator to have a near perfect memory of events. This paper outlines the design and development of a software solution to the practical challenges encountered when trying to give video captured feedback immediately after student performance. The tool, developed using Semantic Web technologies (Berners-Lee et al., 2001), allows educationalists to annotate video in real time for rapid editing and playback by clicking on areas of interest, annotating with text, and ‘bookmarking’. This initial work is informing our approach to the future iterative processes required for refinement of annotation, and other potential applications including analysis of teaching methods. The development illustrates the importance of co-design and collaboration between computer scientists and educational users of technology.

This paper describes how Semantic Grid technologies can be used to generate enhanced tools for data collection that provide enabling technologies for interdisciplinary work, thereby enhancing the capacity to address substantive social science research. A feasibility study is presented in which semantic annotation (i.e. machine-processable annotation using Semantic Web technologies) is used to capture and work with the digital record, in support of subsequent qualitative and quantitative analysis. This case study provides a proof of concept, helping to develop the agenda for future work in this area.

Mobile technologies, such as PDAs, are increasingly being used to create innovative mobile learning experiences for children. Collaboration around use of the PDA has been identified as a key benefit. In this paper we identify the issue of whether it matters who is holding the PDA, and in particular whether there are gender effects at play. We present a preliminary study where we examine the behavior of pairs of children using PDAs in a literacy fieldtrip according to which member the pair held possession of the PDA at any time and whether PDA use influenced who initiated action. Our results indicate that initiating action could be independent of technology 'ownership' for girls, but that for boys initiating action might be more heavily influenced by who was holding the PDA. However, these findings are based on a limited sample and are indicative only. The main contribution of this paper then is to highlight the issue of possible gender effects on how PDAs are used in mobile learning experiences and point to areas for future research to understand how collaborative interactions take place and whether or not it does matter who is holding the PDA.

In this paper we use visualisation techniques to study the human-computer interaction (HCI) of nursing students using an interactive web-based environment for learning clinical skills.

This paper seeks to lay out a number of observations on Pervasive information systems design that have been made during the Chawton House project, an augmented field trip for school children. After laying out the Chawton House case study, the information infrastructure is described and arising issues are examined concerning design for persistence, empowerment of non technical users, and re-use.

This paper describes an approach to the provision of pervasive field trips where a persistent infrastructure is provided, upon which teachers can easily create novel pervasive experiences for children. The physical infrastructure is briefly described along with the underlying information infrastructure, which enables the tools for authoring the content and designing the orchestration of the experience to be placed in the hands of teachers. A literacy experience and initial trials of the system are discussed, conclusions drawn, and future directions outlined.

The reading of a hypertext fiction could simply be viewed as the reordering of events, reviewing and accessing fragments of a story that has already taken place. A different reader experience would come from different orderings and the effects that these might produce. This doesn’t have to be the case however. The fragments of a fiction also can represent possibilities that have yet to occur. This is independent of the over-arching narrative of the piece. At points in the fiction the reader is presented with choices. Do I follow this link or do I choose a different path? Here, the narrative structure of the piece is leaking through the text and not just the read structure but potential future structures. These choices must be presented to the reader by the author. This paper will examine some of the consequences of exposing the visibilities of these narrative structures, using the presentation of choices in hypertext fiction as an exemplar.

Museum research is a burgeoning area of research where ubiquitous computing has already made an impact in enhancing user experiences. The goal of the Chawton House project is to extend this work by introducing ubicomp not to a museum as such, but a historic English manor house and its grounds. This presents a number of novel challenges relating to the kinds of visitors, the nature of visits, the specific character of the estate, the creation of a persistent and evolving system, and the process of developing it together with Chawton House staff.

This paper gives an overview on the use of Protégé in the Artequakt system, which integrated Protégé with a set of natural language tools to automatically extract knowledge about artists from web documents and instantiate a given ontology. Protégé was also linked to structured templates that generate documents from the knowledge fragments it maintains.