Hello,
I*recently received the following request for information from a doctoral
candidate at Texas A&M*University (I*am not affiliated with Texas A&M). I am
passing it on in case anyone has some useful suggestions for him. Please
contact him at kingery@cs.tamu.edu
Thanks,
Bill Swanson
NOTE FROM DAVID KINGERY:
My research area is electronic newspapers and digital libraries. One of the
important issues that needs to be addressed (and has been addressed somewhat
in the past) is how to present the electronic version of the newspaper to
the end user. My research focuses not on the body of an article, but on the
headlines used to initially decide the possible relevancy of an article to
the current information need of the user. With this in mind I am proposing
an experiment to determine the optimal combination of font, size, color, and
layout which will minimize the amount of time required to detect relevancy.
I have decided to look into at least three different populations differing
in age -- a high school group, a college group, and a senior citizens group.
My question is are their any relevant articles from your field (or maybe
there have already been similar studies) which discuss the effects of aging
on tasks similar to those that would be performed in my experiment. I know
this is a brief description and I'll be more than happy to contact you by
phone if you think that would be better, but I felt that by giving you a
"written" description of my proposed research would be beneficial as a
starting point for any discussions.
David Kingery kingery@cs.tamu.edu