Designing interactive electronic conference proceedings

Electronic publishing promises wider, cheaper and easier access to documents; better facilities for organizing, accessing and presenting information; and greater roles for nontextual media. As authors, editors and compilers create electronic documents, they must identify necessary features and components, consider what past projects in computer science and publishing suggest, select publishing and development platforms, and add functionality to these platforms. Conference proceedings-collections of papers and related materials prepared as a record-provide an interesting domain for studying electronic publishing, particularly interaction and the interplay of nontextual and textual materials. Conferences include many materials, such as color graphics, animations and presentations, frequently left out of printed proceedings for reasons of space, cost or inability to present dynamic media. At the same time, too few multimedia systems acknowledge the significant role of text. In developing proceedings for the summer institutes of the Dartmouth Institute for Advanced Graduate Studies, the Dartmouth Experimental Visualization Laboratory addressed the challenges and possibilities of electronic proceedings design