Untitled - witz cultural

149RECONFIGURINGWRITINGretrieval tasks than did comparative neophytes. It would appear that theirexpectations of systems and retrieval mechanisms served to hinder ratherthan to assist their explorations. Accustomed to using full-text search mechanismsin other kinds of computer systems, one of these students spentsome fifteen minutes searching for one in Intermedia-the version useddid not have the system's later search tools-and then gave up on the assignment,assuming that no other methods of locating the information existed.In contrast, a relatively unsophisticated user solved the first problem oflocating works by one scholar in a matter of moments. As he explained: "Ifound these references by opening the Critics Quoted Document in the BibliographicalFolder in the Dickens Folder . . . Total Time: 6 minl' Anothersimilarly responded, "I answered the first question of the assignment usingfthe Intermedia folder system]. Since the folders were labeled well, I found itquick and easy to first find the 'Bibliography' folder, and then open the 'CriticsQuoted' document. There I found the names of the three authors in thequestion. Since the web was already engaged, I could activate the link markersand see all the destination documents connected to a particular author(if in fact the web was well linked). Thus, I approached the web from an oddangle, from the actual document folders, but it was the one which I felt to bethe easiest and quickest for this question. This same information could befound in the Bibliography Overview . . . If I had never come across the VictorianismOverview, for whatever reason, I might never have come across thesought after bibliographic information. But I did find the information, outsidethe system's (few) attempts at organization. I felt so comfortable with thesight of the Macintosh document icon that I felt there was no 'violation,' asIntermedia depicts no structure to be violated-documents seem to be eitherautonomous or within the web" (MF).This student's narrative forcefully restates the truism that people whowant to find information will find it as much by what they know about thatinformation as by system features alone. In other words, odentation by contentseems able to solve potential problems of disorientation caused by thesystem design considered in isolation. In this case, some experienced usersof computer tended to conceive this task as a means of testing system capacitieswhereas those who were content experts, or who took the approoch of acontent expert, conceived the task in terms that made the desired informationthe center of the task.One important lesson for both designers of hypertext software and thosewho teach or write with hypertext appears in the problems encountered bythe students with more computer skills. In relying too heavily on system