The Interpretation of Graphical Information in Word Processing

Abstract

Word processing is one of the most popular digital activities. Despite its popularity, it is haunted by false assumptions, misconceptions, and ineffective and inefficient practices leading to erroneous digital text-based documents. The focus of the present paper is automated numbering and distinguishing between manual and automated numbering. In general, one bit of information on the GUI—the position of the cursor—is enough to tell whether a numbering is manual or automated. To decide how much information must be put on the channel—the teaching–learning process—in order to reach end-users, we designed and implemented a method that includes the analysis of teaching, learning, tutorial, and testing sources, the collection and analysis of Word documents shared on the internet or in closed groups, the testing of grade 7–10 students’ knowledge in automated numbering, and calculating the entropy of automated numbering. The combination of the test results and the semantics of the automated numbering was used to measure the entropy of automated numbering. It was found that to transfer one bit of information on the GUI, at least three bits of information must be transferred during the teaching–learning process. Furthermore, it was revealed that the information connected to numbering is not the pure use of tools, but the semantics of this feature put into a real-world context.

Keywords

• word processing
• cursor
• automated numbering
• GUI
• entropy
• redundancy