Conclusion

Eye-ConTact is both a design philosophy and a crude environment cobbled together out of modified existing tools like TACT and some new tools like the Eye-ConTact Framework program. This last program is a prototype designed to test the interface paradigm proposed here where the user maps out experiments with texts. A modular design encourages one to cobble together such prototypes in the hopes of being able to create more robust modules later. We hope the reader will not condemn the design because the prototype is flawed. In our defense, we believe that the best way to test a design philosophy is to build prototypes that can be tried by scholars on real projects. The project has already revealed some interesting issues regarding the design, which we will note here by way of conclusion:

• What should be represented in a visual development environment such as this: a) the flow of research decisions, or b) the flow of data between actual modules? The same project could look very different when laid out, depending on what one represents.
• Can we design communication protocols and data formats for text analysis modules that would not constrain future developments? If such a protocol and formats could be standardized, would they encourage distributed development of tools?
• What level of detail should be shown on a Map to make it a reasonable representation of the logic of a project? How can details hidden in the forms be shown on the Map when they are important?

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Credits

The BTACT module reuses TACT code originally written by John Bradley and Lidio Presutti.

The McMaster Arts Research Board provided financial and programming support for this project.

The Eye-ConTact Framework program is being created in Visual Basic by Patricia Monger, Visualization Specialist, McMaster University.

The TG graphics module was programmed by Mark Janoska.

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