Papers in PDF format

Chunks were rewritten to add necessary, though sometimes redundant, information. At this point,
chunks often evolved and deepened, especially where we presented practical applications of the research.
Chunk length varied from less than 100 to more than 350 words, and this was related to their evolution. The
hypertext structure enhances this style of development. By the end of the project, we were writing in hypertext
chunks.
While we used images to attract viewers and as lures to deeper levels of information, we also wanted to
ensure that people read the text. We therefore kept text and images close together on all the pages, for example
interpreting illustrations on the same page as the image. We wrote captions after we incorporated animations
and images into the structure of the story to ensure that the context of the illustrations was clear.
4.0 Telling the Story with Pictures: Incorporating Scientific Visualizations and
Illustrations
CTC visualization specialists and individual researchers collaborate to present research results graphically,
often in three or more dimensions. In some cases, these visualizations represent subjects, such as the human
heart, that are easily recognized by a lay audience; in others, the images may be extremely abstract, for
example, a solution surface for a complex series of equations. Inevitably, there are aspects of the visualizations
that require careful explanation and interpretation. The choice of format is thus important and the complexity
of the information included in the images must be considered in terms of clarity as well as file size.
We were able to incorporate still images, animations, and 3D files based on researchers' results to
illustrate the stories, although in many instances, these files required reprocessing. In particular, there was a
great deal of staff time invested in translating 3D files to the VRML format while controlling for file size and
image quality. In addition, most of the animations required extensive editing and reformatting before being
included in the site.
4.1 Still Images
We sought to place the research in context by providing examples of related applications. Illustrations for these
examples were critically important to the publication, both because the structure required them and because
they balanced scientific visualizations which were often exotic in appearance and difficult to interpret. These
additional still images were chosen for their ability to add interest and to clarify the stories and were gathered
from a variety of sources, both hardcopy and electronic. We found these supporting images almost exclusively
via the Web. For example, the image of the Matterhorn was taken from a photograph shot in the summer of
1995 by a mountain climber. We found him by searching the Web using the mountain's name as the keyword
and were delighted when he agreed to digitize his best image and then provided the file to us free of charge.
Whereas we enhanced the visual interest of the book by creating the compound images for the vertical
frame, we did not modify the actual images to which these were linked so that we ensured accuracy of
representation of the researchers' work and fair representation of borrowed images. However, many scientific
visualizations were reformatted, resized, or cropped; several were extracted from animations. All were
reviewed and approved by the researchers.
4.2 Movies
The animations presented in the book were made available to us in a number of formats ranging from video
tape to MPEG movies. Almost all were too lengthy (input video files generated movies of several hundred
megabytes), and often too slow-paced to be translated directly into an online animation. We compromised by
identifying clips from the tapes that would illustrate concepts presented in the text. We did not attempt to edit
any existing soundtracks to fit the clips.
The animations that appear automatically on the pages that present the four sections of the book (for
example, Down to Earth) are server pushes. They are generated, image by image, by the server and sent
sequentially to the browser. The viewer does not have to wait for the entire file to be downloaded (as much as
25 megabytes) or to store such large files on their machines. When the viewer has a reasonable connection to
the network that is not overloaded at the time of viewing, this is a very satisfying option for presenting
animations.
With the exception of the four server push files, virtually all the animations were edited in Adobe
Premiere* and output as flattened QuickTime* movies (the format required by our UNIX server). In many
cases, we adjusted the quality (increasing the contrast during input, for example, to improve the translation