Thinking With Diagrams Digest No 1996

This book provides an introductory overview of the rapid growth in interdisciplinary research into Thinking with Diagrams. Diagrammatic representations are becoming more common in everyday human experience, yet they offer unique challenges to cognitive science research. Neither linguistic nor perceptual theories are sufficient to completely explain their advantages and applications. These research challenges may be part of the reason why so many diagrams are badly designed or badly used. This is ironic when the user interfaces of computer software and the worldwide web are becoming so completely dominated by graphical and diagrammatic representations. This book includes chapters commissioned from leading researchers in the major disciplines involved in diagrams research. They review the philosophical status of diagrams, the cognitive processes involved in their application, and a range of specialist fields in which diagrams are central, including education, architectural design and visual programming languages. The result is immediately relevant to researchers in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, as well as in applied technology areas such as human-computer interaction and information design.

Diagrams 2000 is dedicated to the memory of Jon Barwise. Diagrams 2000 was the ?rst event in a new interdisciplinary conference series on the Theory and Application of Diagrams. It was held at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, September 1-3, 2000. Driven by the pervasiveness of diagrams in human communication and by the increasing availability of graphical environments in computerized work, the study of diagrammatic notations is emerging as a research ?eld in its own right. This development has simultaneously taken place in several scienti?c disciplines, including, amongst others: cognitive science, arti?cial intelligence, and computer science. Consequently, a number of di?erent workshop series on this topic have been successfully organized during the last few years: Thinking with Diagrams, Theory of Visual Languages, Reasoning with Diagrammatic Representations, and Formalizing Reasoning with Visual and Diagrammatic Representations. Diagrams are simultaneously complex cognitive phenonema and sophis- cated computational artifacts. So, to be successful and relevant the study of diagrams must as a whole be interdisciplinary in nature. Thus, the workshop series mentioned above decided to merge into Diagrams 2000, as the single - terdisciplinary conference for this exciting new ?eld. It is intended that Diagrams 2000 should become the premier international conference series in this area and provide a forum with su?cient breadth of scope to encompass researchers from all academic areas who are studying the nature of diagrammatic representations and their use by humans and in machines.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computer Aided Learning and Instruction in Science and Engineering, CALICSE '96, held in San Sebastián, Spain in July 1996. The 42 revised full papers presented in the book were selected from a total of 134 submissions; also included are the abstracts of full papers of four invited talks and 17 poster presentations. The papers are organized in topical sections on learning environments: modelling and design, authoring and development tools and techniques, CAL in distance learning, multimedia and hypermedia in CAL, and applications in science and engineering.