Hub and terminal: Developing a method for textual analysis on the World Wide Web

Author(s):  
Christopher Paul

Although the World Wide Web offers a wealth of texts for analysis, the design of the Web opens questions about where potential research objects begin and end. This paper focuses on how the links underlying the Web can both facilitate and deny connections to other sites, which, when viewing the texts based on their interconnectedness, gives scholars a means by which to constitute a text to analyze while preserving the dynamism of the links within a Web site. Two terms are developed to address the dynamics of different sites, with “hub” and “terminal” design becoming metaphors for the ways in which three online sites engage in the process of (dis)connecting themselves to the Web at large. Using the metaphor of hub and terminal design for analysis of Web texts offers scholars a means by which to stabilize a Web site and offer a platform for textual analysis.

1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth E. Barnes

While students at major universities may have access to the World Wide Web via campus computer labs, many have yet to take advantage of the Web's offerings. Regular demonstrations of Web sites were incorporated into an introductory advertising course to pique students’ interest in the Web. This paper discusses how Web site visits were incorporated into lectures and the students’ evaluation of the Web site component of the course.


Author(s):  
Ross A. Malaga

This chapter examines the role of the World Wide Web in traditional lecture based courses. It details a student oriented approach to the development and maintenance of course Web sites. An experiment was conducted in order to determine if use of a course Web site improves student performance. The surprising results, that students in certain sections did not use the site at all, are analyzed. It was concluded that using the Web in class and making Web assignments part of student’s graded work may impact use of a course Web site.


Author(s):  
Thomas A. Slivinski ◽  
Francis D. Tuggle

The World Wide Web (web) grows apace, yet many web sites possess a confusing design, frustrating would-be users. We offer a structured approach, called SPUD (Site - Purpose Users Design) to the task of designing, not implementing, web sites. Our methodology focuses upon a structured walkthrough of a web site and consists of three phases (and 15 substeps), with possible iteration between the stages. (1) Define the audience characteristics of users of the web site, including their motives for visiting, their demographics, and their likely technological capabilities. (2) Plan accordingly the structure of the web site, the page layouts, and the navigation procedures between pages. (3) Develop and test functions useful to the users of the web site, such as a search function (for a complex web site) or an order function (for a retail web site).


2009 ◽  
pp. 2389-2412
Author(s):  
Ying Liang

Web-based information systems (WBIS) aim to support e-business using IT, the World Wide Web, and the Internet. This chapter focuses on the Web site part of WBIS and argues why an easy-to-use and interactive Web site is critical to the success of WBIS. A dialogue act modeling approach is presented for capturing and specifying user needs for easy-to-use Web site of WBIS by WBIS analysis; for example, what users want to see on the computer screen and in which way they want to work with the system interactively. It calls such needs communicational requirements, in addition to functional and nonfunctional requirements, and builds a dialogue act model to specify them. The author hopes that development of the Web site of WBIS will be considered not only an issue in WBIS design but also an issue in WBIS analysis in WBIS development.


Author(s):  
Ying Liang

Web-based information systems (WBIS) aim to support e-business using IT, the World Wide Web, and the Internet. This chapter focuses on the Web site part of WBIS and argues why an easy-to-use and interactive Web site is critical to the success of WBIS. A dialogue act modeling approach is presented for capturing and specifying user needs for easy-to-use Web site of WBIS by WBIS analysis; for example, what users want to see on the computer screen and in which way they want to work with the system interactively. It calls such needs communicational requirements, in addition to functional and nonfunctional requirements, and builds a dialogue act model to specify them. The author hopes that development of the Web site of WBIS will be considered not only an issue in WBIS design but also an issue in WBIS analysis in WBIS development.


Author(s):  
Anthony D. Andre

This paper provides an overview of the various human factors and ergonomics (HF/E) resources on the World Wide Web (WWW). A list of the most popular and useful HF/E sites will be provided, along with several critical guidelines relevant to using the WWW. The reader will gain a clear understanding of how to find HF/E information on the Web and how to successfully use the Web towards various HF/E professional consulting activities. Finally, we consider the ergonomic implications of surfing the Web.


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deepika Punj ◽  
Ashutosh Dixit

In order to manage the vast information available on web, crawler plays a significant role. The working of crawler should be optimized to get maximum and unique information from the World Wide Web. In this paper, architecture of migrating crawler is proposed which is based on URL ordering, URL scheduling and document redundancy elimination mechanism. The proposed ordering technique is based on URL structure, which plays a crucial role in utilizing the web efficiently. Scheduling ensures that URLs should go to optimum agent for downloading. To ensure this, characteristics of both agents and URLs are taken into consideration for scheduling. Duplicate documents are also removed to make the database unique. To reduce matching time, document matching is made on the basis of their Meta information only. The agents of proposed migrating crawler work more efficiently than traditional single crawler by providing ordering and scheduling of URLs.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Dick

Since it was first formally proposed in 1990 (and since the first website was launched in 1991), the World Wide Web has evolved from a collection of linked hypertext documents residing on the Internet, to a "meta-medium" featuring platforms that older media have leveraged to reach their publics through alternative means. However, this pathway towards the modernization of the Web has not been entirely linear, nor will it proceed as such. Accordingly, this paper problematizes the notion of "progress" as it relates to the online realm by illuminating two distinct perspectives on the realized and proposed evolution of the Web, both of which can be grounded in the broader debate concerning technological determinism versus the social construction of technology: on the one hand, the centralized and ontology-driven shift from a human-centred "Web of Documents" to a machine-understandable "Web of Data" or "Semantic Web", which is supported by the Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, and the organization he heads, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C); on the other, the decentralized and folksonomy-driven mechanisms through which individuals and collectives exert control over the online environment (e.g. through the social networking applications that have come to characterize the contemporary period of "Web 2.0"). Methodologically, the above is accomplished through a sustained exploration of theory derived from communication and cultural studies, which discursively weaves these two viewpoints together with a technical history of recent W3C projects. As a case study, it is asserted that the forward slashes contained in a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) were a social construct that was eventually rendered extraneous by the end-user community. By focusing On the context of the technology itself, it is anticipated that this paper will contribute to the broader debate concerning the future of the Web and its need to move beyond a determinant "modernization paradigm" or over-arching ontology, as well as advance the potential connections that can be cultivated with cognate disciplines.


Author(s):  
Punam Bedi ◽  
Neha Gupta ◽  
Vinita Jindal

The World Wide Web is a part of the Internet that provides data dissemination facility to people. The contents of the Web are crawled and indexed by search engines so that they can be retrieved, ranked, and displayed as a result of users' search queries. These contents that can be easily retrieved using Web browsers and search engines comprise the Surface Web. All information that cannot be crawled by search engines' crawlers falls under Deep Web. Deep Web content never appears in the results displayed by search engines. Though this part of the Web remains hidden, it can be reached using targeted search over normal Web browsers. Unlike Deep Web, there exists a portion of the World Wide Web that cannot be accessed without special software. This is known as the Dark Web. This chapter describes how the Dark Web differs from the Deep Web and elaborates on the commonly used software to enter the Dark Web. It highlights the illegitimate and legitimate sides of the Dark Web and specifies the role played by cryptocurrencies in the expansion of Dark Web's user base.


Author(s):  
August-Wilhelm Scheer

The emergence of what we call today the World Wide Web, the WWW, or simply the Web, dates back to 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee proposed a hypertext system to manage information overload at CERN, Switzerland (Berners-Lee, 1989). This article outlines how his approaches evolved into the Web that drives today’s information society and explores its full potentials still ahead. The formerly known wide-area hypertext information retrieval initiative quickly gained momentum due to the fast adoption of graphical browser programs and standardization activities of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). In the beginning, based only on the standards of HTML, HTTP, and URL, the sites provided by the Web were static, meaning the information stayed unchanged until the original publisher decided for an update. For a long time, the WWW, today referred to as Web 1.0, was understood as a technical mean to publish information to a vast audience across time and space. Data was kept locally and Web sites were only occasionally updated by uploading files from the client to the Web server. Application software was limited to local desktops and operated only on local data. With the advent of dynamic concepts on server-side (script languages like hypertext preprocessor (PHP) or Perl and Web applications with JSP or ASP) and client-side (e.g., JavaScript), the WWW became more dynamic. Server-side content management systems (CMS) allowed editing Web sites via the browser during run-time. These systems interact with multiple users through PHP-interfaces that push information into server-side databases (e.g., mySQL) which again feed Web sites with content. Thus, the Web became accessible and editable not only for programmers and “techies” but also for the common user. Yet, technological limitations such as slow Internet connections, consumer-unfriendly Internet rates, and poor multimedia support still inhibited a mass-usage of the Web. It needed broad-band Internet access, flat rates, and digitalized media processing to catch on.


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