Website Architecture
Figure 3: Graph for Automates Intelligents
The graph for Automates Intelligents has been retrieved at different moments since May 26th 2006. Both the structure of the site and the location of the documents in the graph have remained invariable since then.
Three different sections can be distinguished in the graph (see Figure 3). The top right section corresponds to webpages related to the following options in the menu: Labo, Visites and Democratie. The central section is one of the densest in terms of links and contents. There are three different types of links within this section: (i) those corresponding to almost all the entries in the main menu and to the general indexation of the website; (ii) interactive links related to the subscription to the electronic journal, the sitemap and the help option; and (iii) links to content from Actualité and Art Imaginaire in the main menu. Finally, the third section (i.e., bottom section in the graph) opens up in a peacock tail shape, in which two clusters of links can be distinguished. One of them corresponds to the book collection and the other to the Échanges entry.
Several conclusions can be drawn from the analysis of the graph: (i) the top part of the graph reflects the ideology of the website concerning science, technology, society and democracy; (ii) the dense central part of the graph corresponds to a core of links, in which management functions as well as information and help functions are included; (iii) the bottom part of the graph offers the book collection and the Échanges section(i.e., an electronic journal). This section of the graph also presents recent articles that will be moved to Actualité and Labo archives; (iv) interactive aspects and external links are present in the three sections of the graph; and (v) the internal relationship between the central and bottom section is complex and interactive. Furthermore, the way it is distributed brings to light the interrelationship existing among the processes of exchange, information, archiving and pre-publication.
The analysis of this graph confirms the mirror model hypothesis mentioned in the discussion section above.
Figure 4: Graph for Robot Pals
Although the PBS site is continuously updated and its contents change every day, the Robot Pals site itself has not been updated since its creation, thus eliminating the need for different graphs that reflect possible changes. The graph in Figure 4 shows that the pages that are more closely interrelated form clusters, each of which is linked to the main page (i.e., Robot Pals). The graph exhibits five different clusters: (i) one for the different pages that make up the document A conversation with Cynthia Breazeal: the document consists of three pages, each of which is connected to the others; (ii) one for the different pages that make up the document Intelligent by design: the document consists of four interconnected pages; (iii) one which groups the pages with the summaries of the different parts of the video; (iv) one for three pages that are considered resources: through the links Web links and more the user accesses a page with links to pages with three types of resources (web links, transcripts and show credits); and (v) one for “teaching pages”, accessed through Teaching guide. Although the home pages of the show Robot Pals include two links to a page with the online video, this is not reflected in the graph because the video is not regarded as being closely related to the other pages of the site.
The graph throws light on how the Robot Pals site has been conceived and designed. First, there is no link between pages belonging to different clusters, which shows that the creator of the site conceives clusters as independent units, joined together to form a coherent whole. Second, the graph only shows the elements that are in the central section of the Robot Pals site, and which are specific to this site. It does not reflect the top banner that gives access to different sections of PBS or the left-hand navigation menu for Scientific American Frontiers. This is because the graph only presents the elements that are specific to the Robot Pals site and that can be found on the following level.
The graphs reflecting the architecture of the sites for the other shows in Scientific American Frontiers are very similar to that for the Robot Pals site, with four or five clusters grouping the same kind of contents as in Robot Pals. This fact reflects the high modularity of the Scientific American Frontiers site, where each sub-level has been designed with the same architecture model. This analysis confirms the fractal model previously formulated as a hypothesis in the discussion section above.
Discussion
The Robot Pals site clearly illustrates the fractal design of many websites. A fractal (e.g. a fern) has the same structure on different levels. The Scientific American Frontiers site hosts several sites (which correspond to different shows), each of which was designed with the same frameset. Each of the secondary sites forms a separate module, with its own identity. Existing modules can be eliminated and new modules can be added. Each of these modules consists of smaller-scale objects which are assembled together to make the website, but have their separate identity.
As shown in this paper, an increase in fractal complexity may lead to a rhizomatic structure, as in the case of Automates Intelligents. This website shows a hypertextual rhizomatic structure, based upon mirror effects, which facilitates the two basic objectives of the site, namely, the popularisation of information already present on other websites and the pre-publication of articles in different phases of the elaboration process. The multiple reflections of information presented on the website result in a significant presence of intertextuality and intergenericty phenomena. These reflections may also account for the abundance of internal links that refer to different aspects of information in other documents of the site as well as external links that either redirect the user to the original sources or provide further information on the topic.
The mirror effect is reinforced by the plurilingual ideology of the page. We can say that Automates Intelligents has a mediating purpose since it aims at translating scientific work into different languages, spreading scientific work in other languages, and diversifying the use of vehicular languages. The plurilingual philosophy of the website, which is made explicit in the last paragraph in the editorial Pourquoi ce site or Why this site, is reflected in the plurilinguism of the documents and webpages of the site. In this sense, it is highly significant that in all pages of the site the reader can resort to the program Alexandria, which makes it possible to access the definition of each word in the texts in more than 20 different languages.
The high number of multilingual hyperlinks in the Automates Intelligents site does not only allow setting up connections between traversals to different genres, communicative purposes and features of implicit target audience (i.e. linked documents in different languages may belong to different genres, because they are written for different communicative purposes and intended for different audiences), but also reveals the mediating purpose of the site. The close relationship between multilinguism and mediating purpose is reflected in the use of French to produce abstracts and presentations of texts originally written in other languages, as for example on the page reporting on the Global brain Research Group, or in the Échanges section. Similarly, the Automates Intelligents blog makes it possible to access English pdf documents, such as the NASA’s paper Small Vocabulary Recognition Using Surface Electromyography in an acoustically harsh environment, research done at the Redwood Center (Berkeley), or information on research on robotics and artificial intelligence carried out in Japan (see the links to Kokoro firm or to the Japanese press agency Jiji Press).
The descriptions of Automates Intelligents and Robot Pals above suggest that we could distinguish between websites with different degrees of complexity, Automates Intelligents being much more complex than Robot Pals. The complexity of the mirror effect has a semiotic value since it reflects a rhetoric based on mediation. Fostering the reflection on the relation between discursive form and contents is a way to develop reading autonomy and the capacity of information management. From a pedagogical perspective, we propose that wreaders’ training in new literacies should take into account two aspects: (i) the degrees of complexity, as regards the amount of information or multimodal or generic variation; and (ii) the types of such complexity in qualitative terms, that is, the sociocultural and ideological dimension, implicit to a greater or lesser degree, and the need to be able to interpret and use information in a contextualised way to construct knowledge (Villanueva, 2006), resulting from the importance of an action-oriented perspective of reading. Plurilingual competence is considered a complex communicative competence because its development is related to the social practice through which an integrated interlinguistic and intercultural competence is constructed (Vollmer, 2006: 6-7). The use of ICTs for language learning can help in the construction of such competence if the methodology sets links between the development of linguistic abilities involved in multimodal and multigeneric reading and activities aimed at improving the capacity to interpret information critically. The aim is to offer learning strategies that facilitate the development of wreading autonomy.
<< Description of the Websites | Analysis of Hypertextuality >>