E-Texts and Reading: An on-going study
Dr. Richard Cunningham
Department of English
Acadia University
Wolfville, NS
B4P 2R6
richard.cunningham@acadiau.ca
I am currently composing an electronic edition of Richard Eden’s sixteenth-century text The Arte of Navigation. Based on the 1584 imprint, my electronic edition is an attempt to re-produce electronically a text that originally had images a reader would have to assemble in order to create manipulable paper instruments. Existing copies of this text are seldom correctly assembled, which means that it was the reader rather than a binder, printer, or book seller who assembled the instruments. Knowing this, we can confidently use The Arte of Navigation to construct accurate histories of reading and of education among the likely readership of this text; and once my electronic edition is complete, we will be able to use it to study in great detail the processes by which modern readers process the verbal instructions and the visual images of an electronic text.
I propose to present my on-going development of this electronic edition, and my on-going research into questions of readership. Over the next three years a colleague and I plan to conduct usability studies in the Acadia Digital Culture Observatory to further our understanding of how to read and write effective digital documents. In their 2003 article “Nine ways to reduce cognitive load in multimedia learning,” Richard Mayer and Roxana Moreno argue that multimedia materials pose a challenge for readers because of the potential for cognitive overload in which there are competing demands for limited cognitive capacity. The challenge for people who create multimedia materials is to integrate images and text in a manner that does not distract the reader with incidental information or force readers to overload working memory. It is primarily this challenge that my research seeks to address and on which I will speak at SDH / SEMI.