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This book aims at exploring and illustrating the different ways in which hypermedia systems and tools are designed according to those aspects. The design and visualization schemes included in any system will be related to the variety of social and technical complexities confronted by researchers in social, communication, humanities, art and design.

Digital practices are shaped by graphical representations that appear on the computer screen, which is the principal surface for designing, visualizing, and interacting with digital information. Before any digital image or graphical interface is rendered on the screen there is a series of layers that affect its visual properties. To discover such processes it is necessary to investigate software applications, graphical user interfaces, programming languages and code, algorithms, data structures, and data types in their relationship with graphical outcomes and design possibilities. This book studies interfaces as images and images as interfaces. It offers a comprehensible framework to study graphical representations of visual information. It explores the relationship between visual information and its graphical supports, taking into account contributions from fields of visual computing. Graphical supports are considered as material but also as formal aspects underlying the representation of digital images on the digital screen.

Wikis offer possibilities for education within Web-based environments. Some learning activities include collaborative work, hypermedia writing, information searching and analysis. In this paper, we present some experiences of using Wikis as a platform to support learning activities. We explore some uses and practical issues from an educational technology standpoint. Finally, we discuss the Wiki model by taking into account e-learning standards.

Major issues in the domain of education are, on one hand, the authorship of learning documents and, on the other hand, their pertinent representation, deployment and retrieval through the Web. Common practices to meet basic needs rely on using Learning Management Systems. However, we argue that content authored from these platforms are not pedagogical documents; there is a lack of semantic perspective in order to render learning materials meaningful, discoverable, sharable and exchangeable. Our research proposes an approach to structuring pedagogical documents for hypermedia environments. Our perspective confers priority to Structure First rather than Data First models. We introduce our prototype Web-based tool called SPECS, developed at Laboratoire Paragraphe, University of Paris VIII, which is aimed to assist knowledge workers to interact with semantic pedagogical documents. Finally, we present first user experiences and further work.

Digital practices are shaped by graphical representations that appear on the computer screen, which is the principal surface for designing, visualizing, and interacting with digital information. Before any digital image or graphical interface is rendered on the screen there is a series of layers that affect its visual properties. To discover such processes it is necessary to investigate software applications, graphical user interfaces, programming languages and code, algorithms, data structures, and data types in their relationship with graphical outcomes and design possibilities.This book studies interfaces as images and images as interfaces. It offers a comprehensible framework to study graphical representations of visual information. It explores the relationship between visual information and its graphical supports, taking into account contributions from fields of visual computing. Graphical supports are considered as material but also as formal aspects underlying the representation of digital images on the digital screen. 

This chapter considers the cases where the image being manipulated acts as the graphical interface itself. The idea of studying images as interfaces can be associated with their diagrammatic properties. Pre‐computational uses of images as interfaces can be found in the literature, in the form of diagrams and illustrations from a wide range of fields. The design of image‐interfaces is a complex process because not only must designers construct for a given culture according to their own interpretations, but the visual properties of images can also be used as interactive triggers. The chapter presents examples derived from a small sample of domains where promising approaches to images‐interfaces are constantly developed and prototyped. In practice, the design of image‐interfaces for interactive environments implies assembling diagrammatical schemes from two domains: graphical user interfaces and graphical representations of data. The chapter further tabulates some precursors to data visualization and diagrammatic reasoning.

This chapter explores relevant insights about the study of images that have been forged within the sciences, humanities, and media studies traditions. Visual media consists of what is depicted as image and the material support on which it appears. Visual interfaces are a type of visual media with their own specific characteristics: they convey action and they establish a dynamic space where multiple actors interact at the same time and level (human users, computational procedures, digital media and computer devices). The chapter also explores some characteristics of visual interfaces from the tradition of computer science, history of technology, and media studies. It further deals with exist methods to analyze images and how they exist help people in the design of graphical information. The intention is to explore existing frameworks that put in practice the description of images through a defined model with its values and components.

This chapter adopts a pragmatic perspective towards image‐interfaces: it studies how image‐interfaces are practiced. It discusses the purpose of observing the different manners in which those elements are put together, notably through software applications. The chapter is organized into different categories according to practices of imaging, for example, image editing, parametric design, and also writing and web environments. It provides a practical basis before venturing into prototyping authors' own image‐interfaces. Xerox PARC pioneered many fundamentals of modern graphical interfaces during the 1970s. Trillium was successfully used across Xerox sites as an environment for simulating and experimenting mechanical‐machine interfaces. Chris Coyne had created a context‐free grammar for 2D graphics, and Mark Lentczner and John Horigan developed interactive versions for Mac and Windows. The program interface is divided into three main panels. The left panel is used for writing grammars, the right panel shows the graphical result and the third panel, in the bottom, shows code errors.

This chapter presents author's own productions and experiments created within the context of image‐interface and data visualization. The chapter also covers a range of prototypes, screen shots and sample codes for scripting software applications, integrating data and media visualization, and extending the generated images beyond the screen to “data physicalization” via 3D printing. The accent is put on personal perspectives and ongoing procedures that have been assembled to produce image‐interface prototypes. Choosing a software environment or a programming language greatly influences not only the kind of images obtained, but also how programmers think about the media they handle. In the chapter, the value of an environment such as Processing 2 was essentially in the sense of “software esthetics”. The chapter shows created views of the Processing 2 source code using software visualization tools and techniques. The idea was to put in relation to the underlying components of the software classes and entities.