Digital Medium

As mentioned in class and in Liu's report, the reading style is completely different on a web-page as opposed to the standard, printed word. While reading on web-pages, Liu notes that "The screen-based reading behavior is characterized by more time spent on browsing and scanning, keyword spotting, one-time reading, non-linear reading, and reading more selectively, while less time is spent on in-depth reading, and concentrated reading". I noticed as I read Liu's piece that I was doing exactly the things mentioned. I'd skip over paragraphs and look for things either meaningful or interesting.

Liu comments on the diversity of web-publishing. While traditionally words and words alone carried the meaning in a piece, currently and on web-pages there is a fusion of video, sound, word, and imagery. Readers of web-pages tend to scan around the page, so a nice balance of the different mediums would be ideal. For me, this means that I want to split up the text that I do have with relevant images or video. I want the reader of my hypertext to actually read what I write, so I must make sure my text blocks aren't overwhelming and that my pages are well balanced with images and all that.

The pages about hypertext navigation seemed to me very straight forward and intuitive. The author made the analogy of getting lost in a city to getting lost on a web page. In both cases, it's useful always to know how to get back home. On my hypertext, I've made two links at the bottom of every page that either take the reader back to the project home or to the hypertext home. The links between pages are also extremely important. The author talked about describing external and internal links so the reader knows where he'll be transported before he actually clicks the link. I think on my hypertext pages I might need to label the links a bit more clearly.