A Selection of Documents Regarding the Evolutionary Series of Work 1985-1996
The focus of the effort and activity which generated the evolutionary series of software tools and applications and methods and mechanisms for building information modelling and interactive hypermedia applications was on securing resources – funds to pay staff and to purchase equipment. The conventional sources of research funding in the domains of computer science and psychology were effectively out of reach – where I was a Lecturer in Human Anatomy without knowledge of the published research and where I proposed the employment of a non-academic professional games programmer and graphics artist and the development of novel software – and where the funding I managed to secure was from IT Industry who recognised the potential of my ideas. As working software was developed and demonstrator applications built and delivered, various academic departments and institutions realised the potential and commissioned work e.g. The SMILE teaching resource for the Department of Textile Industries at the University of Leeds: The Victorian Periodicals Project for the Schools of English at the University of Leeds and Manchester Metropolitan University; The ACCESS Project for the University of Leeds Librarian; Leeds : The Intelligent City for the Leeds City Council and University of Leeds Industrial Services; The Environmental Foundations Course for the new University of Leeds Environment Centre.
While we built bespoke applications, we were able to develop, test and evolve the object oriented software components – which were general purpose – providing for the generic functionality of : archiving multimedia files, authoring multimedia applications, managing the distribution, and display of GUIs on the heterogeneous network, the scaling of applications, managing access to applications by multiple users on the network, providing individual log files and feedback e.g. remedial in learning applications etc.
As the original and pioneering development of object oriented software classes for UNIX/X11, the GUI and mechanisms for hypertext/hyper graphics etc were developed and delivered real applications used by real people – papers and tutorials were invited by various journals and conferences. The following list is a selection of these.
- Current Psychology Research & Reviews : Guest Editor 1990 “Hypermedia and Artificial Intelligence”
- Of Spiders, Men and Powerful Ideas, 1991
- Victorian Periodicals HyperText (VPHT) Project: An Interactive Hypermedia Learning Environment, 1992
- The GARDEN Framework: a general application realisation and distribution environment, 1993
- GARDEN Version 1 Revision 4, 1994
- SMILE – an approach to the design and development of information modelling tools for the organisation, management, distribution and delivery of digital multimedia applications, 1994
- SMILE – supporting multimedia interactive learning environments – a pragmatic approach to developing distributed teaching and learning applications on the network, 1994
- University of Leeds Reporter: An approach to ‘Supporting Multimedia Interactive Learning Environments’ through applied prototyping, 1994
- TOOLS USA: BuildingBuilding Models of Multimedia Systems: the idea of maximising re-use with Eiffel, 1995
- Interactive Media International 1994 “Distributed Digital Multimedia Materials : towards new document centred user interfaces?”
- Digital Media & Electronic Publishing 1996 “Information Modelling Tools and Frameworks for the Delivery, Distribution and Management of Digital Multimedia Materials”