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The purpose of this study was to explore the viability of transinformation analysis as a multimodal readability metric. A novel approach was called for, considering that existing and established readability metrics are strictly used to measure linguistic complexity. Yet, the corpus of multimodal literature continues to grow, along with the need to understand how non-linguistic modalities contribute to the complexity of the reading experience.

In this exploratory study, think aloud screen recordings of eighth-grade readers of the born-digital novel Inanimate Alice were analyzed for complexity, along with transcripts of post-oral retellings. Pixel-level entropy analysis served as both an objective measure of the document and a subjective measure of the amount of reader information attention. Post-oral retelling entropy was calculated at the unit level of the word, serving as an indication of complexity in recall.

Findings confirmed that transinformation analysis is a viable multimodal readability metric. Inanimate Alice is an objectively complex document, creating a subjectively complex reading experience for the participants. Readers largely attended to the linguistic mode of the story, effectively reducing the amount of information they processed. This was also evident in the brevity and below average complexity of their post-oral retellings, which relied on recall of the linguistic mode. There were no significant group differences among the readers.

This is the first study that uses entropy to analyze multimodal readability.

Television must escape from the superficial and the newsworthy, and become the means of real mass communication. Maureen O'Connor looks at Brian Groombridge's case for democratic participation in broadcasting.

This paper seeks to urge academic writers to restructure their scholarly writing to reflect the depth of their intellectual message rather than conforming to the structurally simplistic hegemony of the mundane.

The authors of this paper represent interdisciplinary perspectives in research. Each has grown increasingly disillusioned by dwindling consideration given to the structural integrity of scholarly thoughts in academic writing. This paper does not suggest a solution of strict adherence to some style manual or single format, nor does it suggest a privilege to any particular constraint. Indeed, the authors suggest that the digital environment enables unimagined communication possibilities, and hence a counterpoise to any single rigid structure. New formats require attention to the engineering of message structure. Using historical examples and modern applications from their disciplines, the authors offer provocations on the structures of scholarly writing. They pay particular attention to modern applications of Claude Shannon's information theory and to the introduction of models for understanding the audiences of academic writing.

Scholarly writing warrants a deep investment of intellectual, personal, and communicative effort. Readers will have different requirements for any individual piece of scholarly writing, but all will be served by the fullest expression of the logic, care, tenacity, and passion that drove the research to fruition. Engineering the scholarly document to contribute to audiences of differing interests and abilities requires careful consideration rather than mere assumption of a generic reader.

Research for this paper yielded few preceding studies that considered document structures for scholarship. Authors of this paper intend to provoke academes to engage in active and intentional reconsiderations of how they choose to say what they have to say, by following the presented examples of writing and tools for measuring structural elements of documents.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the structure of entertainment media as a possible foundation for measuring aspects of visual presentations that could enhance or interfere with audience engagement.

Factors that might account for the large number of negative comments about visual presentations are identified and a method of calculating entropy measurements for form attributes of presentations is introduced.

Entropy calculations provide a numerical measure of structural elements that account for engagement or distraction. A set of peer evaluations of educational presentations is used to calibrate a distraction factor algorithm.

Distraction as a consequence of document structure might enable engineering of a balance between document structure and content in document formats not yet explored by mechanical entropy calculations.

Mathematical calculations of structural elements (form attributes) support what multimedia presentation viewers have been observing for years (documented in numerous journals and newspapers from education to business to military fields): engineering PowerPoint presentations necessarily involves attention to engagement vs distraction in the audience.

Exploring aspects of document structures has been demonstrated to calibrate viewer perceptions to calculated measurements in moving image documents, and now in images and multimedia presentation documents extending Claude Shannon's early work communication channels and James Watt and Robert Krull's work on television programming.

This chapter explores the topic of supporting young people to become innovators for societal change in terms of equity and renewal from the perspective of school principals in Northern Ireland, a post-conflict society. We examine how school principals can be empowered in their role in providing this support and the challenges and turbulence that they face in their work. The chapter provides contextual information about education in what is still largely a divided society in Northern Ireland. The principals who were interviewed as part of this research were working within school partnerships as part of ‘shared education’ projects. In Northern Ireland, the Shared Education Act (2016) provides a legislative basis for two or more local schools from different educational sectors to work in partnership to provide an opportunity for sustained shared learning activities with the aim of improving both educational and reconciliation outcomes for young people. The challenges for school leadership of working in partnership in societies emerging from conflict has not been given the attention it deserves in the literature, so this work is significant in that it brings together a focus on school leadership in a ‘shared education’ context, drawing on theories of collaboration and turbulence to examine how principals can best be empowered to be agents of change, so that pupils in Northern Ireland can also become empowered to make society there more equitable and peaceful. While the focus is on Northern Ireland, the learnings from this study will be of wider interest and significance as similar challenges are faced by school leaders internationally.

This study explores the use of the information theory entropy equation in representations of videos for children. The calculated rates of information in the videos are calibrated to the corresponding perceived rates of information as elicited from the 12 seven‐ to ten‐year‐old girls who were shown video documents. Entropy measures are calculated for several video elements: set time, set incidence, verbal time, verbal incidence, set constraint, nonverbal dependence, and character appearance. As hypothesized, mechanically calculated entropy measure (CEM) was found to be sufficiently similar to perceived entropy measure (PEM) made by children so that they can be used as useful and predictive elements of representations of children's videos. The relationships between the CEM and the PEM show that CEM could stand for PEM in order to enrich representations for video documents for this age group.

The paper provides a theory base for deriving connotative descriptors for photographs from existing denotative descriptors, and then demonstrates a model for enhancing browsing within image collections by providing a tool for carving up the searching space.

The paper conceptually explores the nature of iconic messages contained in an image by adopting semiotics as a theoretical tool. A problem of image retrieval is identified as loss of connotative messages during the image representation process. The paper proposes an image‐retrieval model utilizing an association thesaurus that facilitates the assignment of connotative index terms by making use of denotative index terms of an image. A series of experiments are performed for evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Experimental results demonstrate that the association thesaurus improves image‐retrieval effectiveness by increasing the recall of connotatively related image documents as well as the recall of browsing sets.

Applying connotative index terms to an image would be time consuming. Deriving connotative terms from denotative terms and then using them to enrich the browsing environment suggest a method of increasing retrieval effectiveness while reducing the resources required for representation.

Since images are often used to illustrate concepts that are not immediately evident from just the objects in front of the lens, connotative descriptions are particularly valuable. Since human perception of images is, in a sense, hard wired into our brains, browsing is a frequent and reasonable search method in image collections. Using connotative descriptors to point the way to clusters of images with a higher probability of relevance changes the locus of control over representation establishes an environment for dynamic representation, and gives credibility to browsing as a significant search method.

Analysis of user viewing and query‐matching behavior furnishes additional evidence that the relevance of retrieved images for system users may arise from descriptions of objects and content‐based elements that are not evident or not even present in the image. This investigation looks at how users assign pre‐determined query terms to retrieved images, as well as looking at a post‐retrieval process of image engagement to user cognitive assessments of meaningful terms. Additionally, affective/emotion‐based query terms appear to be an important descriptive category for image retrieval. A system for capturing (eliciting) human interpretations derived from cognitive engagements with viewed images could further enhance the efficiency of image retrieval systems stemming from traditional indexing methods and technology‐based content extraction algorithms. An approach to such a system is posited.

This study examines the fashioning of a model for a surrogate to facilitate user selection of the most appropriate film or video work for a particular use. Such a surrogate is intended to enable a user to bring to a collection of moving image documents the habits of scrutiny characteristic of the selection and critical use of print linguistic works. Images bear a different relationship to objects and events than do words and the manner in which moving image documents generate meaning differs from the way strings of words communicate. A matrix of a time line and several characteristics of the film or video document is proposed as the primary aspect of the surrogate graphic record. Issues of description and sampling within the abstracting process are raised. The proposed surrogate is seen as a system for achieving an individual, more book‐like use of film and video documents.