Xerox Scientist Finds Meaning in How Documents Are Presented

Xerox Scientist Finds Meaning in How Documents Are Presented
When it comes to conveying meaning, how a document looks can be as critical as the words it carries, according to a Xerox Corporation researcher who is investigating document "intents" and the impact of cross-media design as a document moves between paper and digital displays.

Whether a ballot is displayed on a touch-screen monitor or printed on paper, for example, its effectiveness depends on attributes such as design, the user's comfort with the technology, whether it is easy to find necessary information, and feedback about completion - values that are all quite independent of the content, said Steven J. Harrington, a research fellow in Xerox's Imaging and Services Technology Center in Webster, N.Y. However, the intent in either format is the same -- effectively facilitating action.

Harrington worked out the concept of document intents and developed ways to quantify document properties such as aesthetics in collaboration with Rhys Price Jones and J. Fernando Naveda - from Rochester Institute of Technology - Nishant Thakkar, an RIT student now at IBM, and Paul Roetling, a consultant. They presented a paper today at the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering here entitled "Aesthetic Measures for Automated Document Layout." On October 22 at the American Association for Artificial Intelligence's symposium on Style and Meani