Content-Driven Density: What price anchors?

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When anchors are embedded in content, the line-by-line, word-by-word reading task is broken. The more anchors, the more reading interruptions.

Invitations to ponder

The artistic uses of dense anchors within the content tended to explore relationships and invite exploration:

  • I'm Simply Saying [35] uses anchors to convey dynamic content.
  • Samplers [37] uses both densely anchored text to emphasize themes and densely anchored maps to overlay stories and connections.
  • While Reach [28] and Charmin' Cleary [16] both ensure that each text is anchoral, Reach has more anchors per node: Charmin' Cleary has 3 per node and Reach's anchors are on phrases and sentences, with 2 to 15 per node.

Invitations to leave

Anchors provide readers with obvious opportunities to exert some control over their reading experiences and thus invite readers to leave the current node. This invitation is stronger in content-dense anchors as the reader interrupts the reading. Authors can make the invitation stronger by drawing attention to the anchors themselves with moderate or striking decorations (e.g., The Unknown [56] or Wikipedia [68]).

Densely sites with non-distinguished or selective decorations such as Reach [28] or Charmin' Cleary [16] and Notes Toward Absolute Zero [41] may have as many anchors as the Unknown. However, as the anchors don't readily show up, these works focus attention on the node's text rather than exit points.

This invitation is less obvious in navigation-dense anchors are readers are not confronted with the anchors while accessing content.