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Clownpants in the classroom?Hypnotizing chickens?

Measurement of structuraldistraction in visual presentation

documentsJodi Kearns

Center for the History of Psychology, The University of Akron,Akron, Ohio, USA, and

Brian C. O’ConnorLibrary and Information Science, University of North Texas,

Denton, Texas, USA

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to consider the structure of entertainment media as a possiblefoundation for measuring aspects of visual presentations that could enhance or interfere with audienceengagement.Design/methodology/approach – Factors that might account for the large number of negativecomments about visual presentations are identified and a method of calculating entropy measurementsfor form attributes of presentations is introduced.Findings – Entropy calculations provide a numerical measure of structural elements that account forengagement or distraction. A set of peer evaluations of educational presentations is used to calibrate adistraction factor algorithm.Research limitations/implications – Distraction as a consequence of document structure mightenable engineering of a balance between document structure and content in document formats not yetexplored by mechanical entropy calculations.Practical implications – Mathematical calculations of structural elements (form attributes) supportwhat multimedia presentation viewers have been observing for years (documented in numerousjournals and newspapers from education to business to military fields): engineering PowerPointpresentations necessarily involves attention to engagement vs distraction in the audience.Originality/value – Exploring aspects of document structures has been demonstrated to calibrateviewer perceptions to calculated measurements in moving image documents, and now in images andmultimedia presentation documents extending Claude Shannon’s early work communication channelsand James Watt and Robert Krull’s work on television programming.

Keywords Entropy, Applied information theory, Document structure, Humour, Visual presentations

Paper type Research paper

Introduction

Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t knowthe first thing about either (Marshall McLuhan).

A grasshopper walks into a bar and asks for a drink. The bartender says, “You know, wehave a drink named after you.” And the grasshopper replies, “You have a drink named Bob?”

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available atwww.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm

Received 28 January 2013Revised 2 April 2013Accepted 4 April 2013

Journal of DocumentationVol. 70 No. 4, 2014pp. 526-543r Emerald Group Publishing Limited0022-0418DOI 10.1108/JD-01-2013-0009

An earlier form of this study appears in O’Connor, Kearns, and Anderson’s “Doing Things withInformation” (2008) by Libraries Unlimited, where this research was presented in brief as anoverview of a work-in-progress.

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It is funny, because it is surprising, unpredicted; it feels risky and causes discomfort;and it sways from established societal grammars. As long as one has some existingknowledge of both a grasshopper (a winged orthopteran insect with hind legs adaptedfor jumping) and a grasshopper (3/4 oz green creme de menthe, 3/4 oz white creme decacao, and 3/4 oz light cream), one understands the joke.

Whether or not one understands the quip, one experiences both the familiar to theunfamiliar in the introductory sentence “A grasshopper walks into a bar and asks fora drink.” Remove grasshopper from the sentence and add x, where x equals anypossible passerby of the said drinking facility. Many North American adults areprobably familiar with the joke lead in “An x walks into a bar [y]” and upon hearingit, prepare themselves to receive a witty statement within the next few minutes.Despite the anticipation of humor, the recipient laughs – or groans, as it is with lesssophisticated humor – and files it in his or her knowledge store for easy retrieval anduse on another unsuspecting recipient. The humor is that one is taken down onepath, then with right timing shown that it is really the other schema that was in play.Messages that cause some type of upset in a personal information system elicitsurprise (Itti and Baldi, 2009; Wilson, 1977).

Many parts of this joke present absurd notions of reality. Grasshoppers do notnormally walk into bars, and if perchance one does – though it would likely be more ofa hop – it would be impossible for it to order a drink, and even if it could order a drink,it would be impossible for it to consume the entire beverage and live. It seems evenmore absurd that a bartender (assumed to be a human creature) would speak to agrasshopper that just wandered into his establishment demanding a drink andentertain the notion that perhaps the grasshopper may already be aware of the factthat there is a drink named after him. To complete the absurdity is the grasshopper’sreply: “You have a drink named Bob?” Not only can this grasshopper speak, but it alsohas a name common among human pub goers. The recipient laughs not only at theabsurdity that has been built in three short sentences, but also at the dramatic ironythe grasshopper has suffered for not possessing the a priori knowledge of the potentlibation, a grasshopper.

So what? Communication, obviously, depends on message structure, willingnessand ability to understand message components, and context. Useful information, orcommunication, is the as yet unknown – but one can be prepared for the unknownwithin the structures of what is known. Good hunting – which Wilson (1968) assertswe must do, because no information retrieval system will be perfectly designed foreach user and each use – hinges on discovering the useful unknown: sometimesdetecting the slight difference from the norm; sometimes knowing the pattern(“an x walks into a bar”) that will put one in the right place. As with hunting, the jokeformat tells us to expect the unexpected. Paul Rezendez, a wildlife photographer,asserts, “If you spend time learning about the animal and its ways, you may be ableto find the next track without looking [y] Tracking an animal [y] brings you closerto it in perception” (Rezendes, 1992, p. 7). Thus, we might say that humor, as astructural method of applying entropy (unpredictability) of a communicated message,could serve as a probe or touchstone for thinking about information seekingenvironments.

In a joke, the punch line is an entropic burst. When one sees a person in a crimsonprosthetic nose and in the pants of a clown, one assumes funny occurrences areimpending. When one sees a person wearing no pants, one preps oneself for surprise.Conversely, when an average looking person – or a common grasshopper – says

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Clownpants inthe classroom?

something funny or unexpected or unusual, one enjoys an affected jolt or entropicburst that causes the laugh or the groan.

Defining the clownpants continuumNote: The authors understand that the word pants means different things in differentareas of the English-speaking world, so we want to explain that the word is used in thispiece in the same context as trousers in England or daks in Australia (or pantaloons,historically).

What is funnier than a teacher wearing clown pants? Except, perhaps, no pants?“Clownpants” in visual presentation design is the predictability of unpredictableelements; that is to say that by confusing the structure of a message and engagingentropy with hyperbolic structural change or form over structure. That is, in, forexample, by using frequent structural changes such as seemingly randomcombinations of mixing font types, numerous font colors, inserting differenttransition effects between each pair of slides, animating content, combing clipart forphotographs, and so on, and by doing this with regularity causes the viewer to expectentropic elements, thus robbing them of their novelty. “No pants” in visual andmultimedia presentations indicates that, to some degree, the presentation ofinformation is underdressed, or bare, and is predictable as such. Using single font,no illustrations, no audio clips, and having the presenter simply read the text on thescreen presents little novelty to the viewer, little of the surprise that maintainsengagement with the information processing task (Watt, 1979).

Clownpants is not meant to be yet another set of guidelines to follow for effectivePowerPoint presentation construction; many such sets already exist that expressfunctional tips (see Mahin, 2004; Vik, 2004; DuFrene and Lehman, 2004; Barrett, 2012;Bartsch and Cobern, 2003; Bird, 2001; Brown, 2001); rather, measurements ofPowerPoint document structure offer one possibility for quantifying commonlyaccepted (see Parker, 2001; Schwom and Keller, 2003; Byrne, 2003; Norvig, 2003a, b;Keller, 2002; Livraghi; Worley and Dyrud, 2004; Mitchell, 2009; Ellwood, 2005)structural distractions, misuses, and malengineering. Retired Marine Colonel ThomasX. Hammes refers to PowerPoint slides using bulleted points as the main channel ofmessage delivery as “Dumb-Dumb Bullets” and those PowerPoint-“supported”sessions that put viewers to sleep as “hypnotizing chickens” (Bumiller, 2010).Exploring this clownpants continuum seems to be an infinitely repeating task: can oneinformation seeker’s perception of clownpants be quantified? or scaled to fit intoa spectrum? Viewers’ perceptions of information of moving image documents havebeen calibrated to mechanically calculated numerical representations of the samedocuments using the Mathematical Theory of Communication (Kearns and O’Connor,2004). That is to say that some viewers’ perceptions can be represented as numberson a zero to one scale by applying Claude Shannon’s model for determining the rate ofchange of information in any communicated message: entropy.

A multimedia presentation, like any other document, is a binary system in whichstructure and meaning have a relationship that is complementary but not fixed,necessarily universal, nor independent of the recipient (Anderson, 2006). Informationmust not be confused with meaning (O’Connor et al., 2008) – no more than syntaxequals semantics in a communicated message – nor can information and meaning beused interchangeably (Shannon and Weaver, 1949). Moles complies, asserting that“information differs essentially from meaning: information is only a measure ofcomplexity” (1966, p. 196). Information, in this synthesis, is the physical presentation of

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a message; it is a separate attribute of the message. An author seeks to get somenotion embedded into some medium according to a coding system decodable by theintended recipient; so the message does not hold the author’s notion as its content,only a code. When the information transfer itself confuses a recipient, the actualcontent or meaning of the communicated message is compromised. If the recipientdoes not have the decoding ability that was assumed by the author of the message, themessage still exists yet the author’s notion will be less clear, less obvious.

Information is separate from meaning; however, it is the embodiment of the codingsystem. Thus, when the purpose of a multimedia presentation is to deliver content,message structure can get in the way; that is, it can be its own noise. When “bellsand whistles” are added to the message, the extra effort required to decode such amessage can get in the way – little or no meaning extracted at the expense ofsignificant effort can lead the recipient to give up or back off from expending effortat decoding (Blair, 1990). When the structure is more complex than the decodingability, we might call this “clownpants.” When the structure is not sufficiently complex,we might call this “no pants.” That is, very high complexity, clownpants, may resultin low engagement because the predictability of unpredictable elements is high.Similarly, when the structure never changes, is boring, and uniform, and meaning isconveyed through bare syntax, the presentation wears “no-pants,” and engagementis low: boredom by baredom. Much like the anticipation or expectation one feels whenwatching a clown because creating surprises is central to the clown’s job; and muchlike, if one sees a naked man walking on the street, the unexpected becomes expected:he has bared his barest, like the empty PowerPoint presentation, and has left nothingto the proverbial imaginations of viewers. The viewer stops paying attention to whatthe person is saying, in both the clownpants and no-pants presentation because theinformation (not the meaning) is overwhelmingly distracting.

At very least, “presentation format should do no harm to content” (Tufte, 2003,p. 24) (see Figure 1) and the goal – seemingly – should be to use high entropycomponents in multimedia design to create emphasis and to draw-in and hold viewerattention. A teacher wearing clownpants and a teacher wearing no pants are mediawhose formats will distract from the message. The desired communication (content,semantics) seems less important than the method of content delivery.

Entropy measures based on the original model of Shannon and Weaver (1949) andthe interpretations of this model by James Watt (1979) and Kearns (2001) demonstratea means of measuring form attributes of PowerPoint presentations.

Shannon’s original formula:

H ¼ �Xk

i¼1

pi � log2ðpiÞ

Numerical representations of form attributes of presentations indicate some degree ofclownpantsiness in the communicated message. Following, we derive a set of formattributes and present a variation of the approach of Watt and Krull (1974) for makingentropy measures of those attributes. We then calibrate the system of entropymeasurements against an actual set of PowerPoint presentations. These presentationswere made by pre-service teachers as instructional tools. We also make use of theirpeer evaluations to augment our calibration and to have evidence of their reactions(Figure 1).

529


Methodology for Wattian entropy in multimedia presentationsKearns and O’Connor (2004) demonstrated that Shannon’s original entropy equationcan be applied to the communication of moving image documents, so long as oneunderstands that information is measurable (Moles, 1966; Shannon and Weaver,1949) and that these entropy measurements can represent user perceptions of thecommunications. Watt and Krull (1974) and Watt (1979) modified Shannon’s statisticalmodel to measure the information of several “form attributes” of moving imagedocuments. Kearns (2001) extrapolates the measurability of information in mediaother than moving image documents and suggests that these entropy calculationscan also represent reader or viewer perceptions of books and photographs. Someof the form attribute entropies were developed from this articulation of measurableattributes of books for children and of photographs and were applied to form attributesof presentations. For this study, information of form attributes is measured in multimediapresentations, for the purpose of quantifying the clownpants-nopants continuum.Ten form attributes of presentations were selected for this articulation; theirdefinitions, formulae, and descriptions are shown in Tables I and II shows theentropy calculations of these form attributes applied to 24 multimedia presentationsengineered by pre-service teachers.

Entropy measures of form attributes were selected to specifically address elementsof multimedia presentations that make them different from traditional presentations(overhead transparencies, mimeographed handouts, greyscale photocopies), assumingthat each of these form attributes is a measurable form of communication. Thecommunicated information of color attributes is measurable with Color Incidence

These pantsmake me feel like

a clown.

They don’t lookso bad to me.

Source: This image is used by permission from Linda Causey from www.aperfectworld.org

Figure 1.“[y] format should do noharm to content” (Tufte,2003, p. 24) is like notseeing the person insidethe pants

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1576

800.

1735

610.

1150

700.

5283

210.

2732

990.

3056

780.

3678

450.

0000

000.

2615

600.

3208

99S

ub

ject

240.

1482

670.

4171

03–

0.33

2193

0.25

0181

0.00

0000

0.52

1959

–0.

3063

970.

4503

26

Table II.Entropy calculations of

ten PowerPoint formattributes of presentationsdesigned by 24 pre-service

teachers

533


Entropy (HCO) and Color Range Entropy (HCR); of animation attributes withAnimation Distribution Entropy (HAD) and Animation Incidence Entropy (HAI);of slide transition attributes with Transition Variance Entropy (HVT) andTransition Incidence Entropy (HTI); of sound attributes with Sound Effects Entropy(HSE); of text attributes with Word Incidence Entropy (HWI) and Weighted TextEntropy (HWT); and of image and graphics attributes with Weighted PictureEntropy (HWP).

For calculating HCO (from Kearns, 2001) and HCR, each slide of each of the 24PowerPoint presentations was converted into a JPEG image at the default size of960�720 pixels. Then, using PaintShopTM Pro colors were counted. For HAD andHAI, one animation event was defined in terms of the custom animation windowwithin PowerPoint, since the application lists animation events chronologically and interms of their relation to other animation events. If the purpose of the animation was,for example, to quickly insert ten squares, one after the other, all automated to entersequentially, PowerPoint calls it one animation event. Transition attributes aremeasurable with HTI and HVT, and in presentations that contained no transitioneffects, the number of transition effects equals zero. Measuring sound attributes ispossible with HSE. The number of sounds used in each presentation reflects bothsound effects added to animations and inserted sound clips from the sound clipsgallery. It was counted as one sound effect even when a sound effect was set to repeatuntil the next click of the mouse, or, similarly, to repeat x number of times. Textattributes were calculated with HWI (from Kearns, 2001) and HWT. Text is visualinformation and though it is difficult to separate from the meaning the text gives to thepresentation, this study does not attempt to measure content attributes. Also, studentswere asked to include specific textual information on a title slide. In order not toeliminate the title slide from the HWI, and yet not to give it more undo influence,a simple average was used to normalize the HWI. HWT and HWP are the only twoattributes that measure entropy against a time constraint. These pre-service teacherswere expected to design ten-minute presentations. These entropies measure theirchoices to include text or pictures/graphics weighted against the expected length ofthe presentation. The cells in Table II shown with a “–” had values that produced errorswhen inserted into the formula.

HCO, HCR, HTI, HAD, and HWT measures for Subject 10, for example, are all verylow, and yet HAI is 0.5, which is the highest entropy measurement. This studentused one single animation effect to emphasize the most important semantic point inthe presentation. The effectiveness of this strategy is shown in HAI¼ 0.5 for thispresentation. Similarly, other students opted to employ fewer sound effects (HSE01,HSE02, HSE23, HSE21, for example) which results in high entropy values for this formattribute, and in emphasis drawn to that particular sound effect event, and the contentattached to the event, in the presentation. Whereas HSE06 and HSE11 have valuesof 0 because they each engineered their PowerPoint presentations to include the samesound effect to occur with each slide transition, causing the sound effect to be moreof a distracting than an attractive feature.

Peer evaluations of multimedia presentationsYet the question remains, can these measurements adequately represent an actualviewer’s perception of the physical information of the presentation? Pre-serviceteachers evaluated the PowerPoint presentations of their peers by first composing

534

JDOC70,4

questions that would help focus and express their perceptions of the PowerPointpresentations created by their classmates. The questions they asked were:

(1) How effective do you think the presentation was?

(2) Was the presentation developmentally and age appropriate for the grade?

(3) Was the presenter knowledgeable about the subject?

(4) Is the presentation grade level appropriate?

(5) Did the presentation enhance or detract from the content?

(6) Overall, the presentation was effective.

(7) Were you able to follow the presentation?

(8) Was the presentation attention grabbing?

(9) How was the presentation delivery?

(10) Were the objectives of the presentation clear and precise?

(11) Did the presentation flow?

(12) Was the presentation clear and precise?

(13) Was the slide presentation informative?

(14) Were the moving digital images distracting?

(15) Was the presenter able to clearly explain the presentation?

(16) Was it visually appealing?

(17) How effective was the PPT presentation in understanding the lesson?

(18) Were there clear objectives to the lesson?

(19) Was the PPT lesson organized appropriately?

(20) Did the presentation take away from the message?

(21) Were there too many clownpants? Were the slides too busy?

(22) Do the colors compliment each other well?

(23) Was the message of the presentation clear?

(24) Were the elements of the presentation relevant to the message?

(25) Did the presentation have a good structure?

(26) Did it flow?

(27) Was the information clear?

(28) Was the presentation age appropriate?

(29) Did the slides have too much color and too many pictures?

(30) Did the slides lack color and pictures?

(31) Did the presentation bore you?

(32) What do you think about the amount of info presented? too much, justenough, not enough, what info?

(33) Were the slides visually pleasing or boring?

535


These questions, perhaps, seem more significant when one considers how someonemight categorize these questions or possibly answer them with emotive descriptorsthat define entropy: “interest[ing], exciting, like[able], funny, boring, and surprising”(Kearns and O’Connor, 2004), Simon’s (2005) “risky”, and the sources from which thelist was contrived from Shannon and Weaver’s (1949) “confusing”; Augst andO’Connor’s (1999) “dull” and “dynamic”; Watt’s (1979) “exciting,” “interest,” and“boring”; Wilson’s (1977) “disequilibrium” and “discomfort”, and Campbell’s (1982)“dull” and “exciting”. Pre-service teachers seem to want exciting PowerPointpresentations, though they have difficulty engineering excitement, or differentiating“excitement” from overuse of special effects.

Students were asked to answer five questions (see Table III) for each of their peers’presentations after the presentations were presented in front of the class. Table IIIshows the questions with corresponding answer selection lists and Table IV shows thenumbers of each response elicited from perceptions of peers’ presentations.

Since the A response to each question indicated best practice, our primary interest isin the data that are in B, C, and D responses. What was perceived in the form attributesof the presentation of C2-S10 that elicited more B responses to Question 2 than anyother presentation? More viewers perceived that nothing grabbed their attentionduring that particular PowerPoint presentation than any other presentation. And whatwas perceived in the presentation of C2-12 that incited more B responses to Question 4?More viewers were bored by this presentation than any other. Possibly, thepresentation was predictable and less entertaining or engaging, at least compared to allother presentations. Peer perceptions of PowerPoint presentations is a topic worthy offurther consideration: is there a place for clownpants in the classroom? or no-pants? Ifpre-service teachers tend toward these spectrum poles, do the recipients (theirstudents) understand the lesson content without structural distraction from thepresentation?

Formulating Clownpants Index (CPI) with distraction factor (DF)The entropic burst in multimedia presentation defines the moment when informationbecomes reactive. Entropic burst is the moment at which cognitive structure straysfrom the anticipatory response (Hayes, 1993); or that instant that all else is forgotten

Did the presentation enhance or detract from thelesson/message?

A. enhancedB. detractedC. neither/neutral opinion

Was the presentation attention grabbing? A. yesB. noC. somewhat

Were the elements of the presentation relevant tothe message?

A. yesB. noC. somewhere in between

Did the presentation bore you? A. noB. a littleC. yesD. I didn’t watch it; I wasn’t paying attention

Were the slides visually pleasing? A. yes, they were appropriateB. no, they were boringC. no, they were distractingD. I fell asleep; where am I?

Table III.Questions with multiplechoice answers writtenby students forpeer-evaluations ofPowerPoint presentations

536

JDOC70,4

(Patrick Wilson, 1999, personal communication) and the viewer accepts that it is okayto react to the surprise; or where the PowerPoint presentation has been engineered toalter cognitive state (Shannon and Weaver, 1949).

Designing multimedia presentations with entropic bursts means finding a functionalbalance between format and content, syntax and semantics, and clownpants andno-pants. This balance occurs when entropy measurements are in midrange (Watt andKrull, 1974; Watt, 1979; Kearns, 2001; Kearns and O’Connor, 2004). High-entropyelements (unpredictable, surprising, exciting, uncomfortable) measure around 0.5on this scale. Low-entropy elements (predictable, boring, unexciting, comfortable)measure closer to 0 and to 1 on this same scale. The degree of entropy in acommunicated message can be represented as a normal curve. The closer an entropymeasurement of a PowerPoint form attribute rests to either extreme, the more thatelement distracts from the semantic absorption of the desired communication, similarto Shannon and Weaver (1949) notion of noise on the communication channeldistracting a communicated message. The DF, then, is measurable in the degree ofclownpants and no pants and can be represented as a bi-modal curve. Distraction fromthe semantic message is high because the syntactic message is louder.

Question 1 Question 2 Question 3 Question 4 Question 5A B C A B C A B C A B C D A B C D

Class1-Student1 8 1 6 3 9 7 2 6 1C1-S2 9 8 1 8 9 9C1-S3 9 8 1 9 9 9C1-S4 9 9 9 9 9C1-S5 8 1 9 9 9 9C1-S6 9 1 8 2 10 10 10C1-S7 10 9 1 10 9 1 10C1-S8 10 9 1 10 9 1 9 1C1-S9 10 10 1 10 10 10C1-S10 9 1 8 2 8 2 7 3 1 8 1 1C1-S11 9 9 9 9 9Class2-Student1 17 13 4 17 16 1 16 1C2-S2 13 2 2 15 2 15 2 16 1 16 1C2-S3 16 1 13 4 17 14 2 17C2-S4 15 2 11 1 5 17 11 6 15 1 1C2-S5 17 17 16 1 17 17C2-S6 17 16 1 17 16 1 17C2-S7 16 1 15 4 16 1 11 6 16 1C2-S8 17 16 1 17 17 17C2-S9 17 16 1 17 14 1 2 16 1C2-S10 13 3 11 3 3 15 1 1 12 3 2 15 2C2-S11 16 1 13 2 2 17 15 2 15 2C2-S12 15 2 11 1 5 16 1 12 5 15 1 1C2-S13 17 17 17 17 17C2-S14 17 17 17 16 1 17C2-S15 15 2 15 2 17 17 17C2-S16 16 1 15 1 1 17 16 1 15 1 1C2-S17 17 17 17 17 17C2-S18 17 16 1 17 17 17C2-S19 17 16 1 17 17 17C2-S20 16 1 13 4 17 13 3 1 16 1

Table IV.Peer responses to

perceptions of PowerPointpresentations

537


This DF, then, in multimedia presentations can be represented numerically with aformula and expressed as a number (Table V) on the familiar scale of 1 and 10, where10 is a high DF.

Calculating the DF of syntactic attributes in multimedia presentations:

DF ¼ 0:5� Hj jð Þ � 20

when:

H ¼ �Xk

i¼1

pi � log2ðpiÞ

The distribution of DFs on the CPI fluctuates for each form attribute just as calculatedentropy measurements for each form attribute vary. For Subject 16, for example, HWPis high (HWP¼ 0.450548, see Table II) so the DF of this form attribute is low(DFWP¼ 0.98904), when other DFs are higher. The visual representation of the DFs ofthe form attributes of Subjects 1, 9, 16, and 23 are shown in Figure 2. Both Subjects 9and 23 had a DF for the form attribute Transition Variance (DFVT) equal to 10,demonstrating that the variance of their selections for transition effects between slideswas distracting by a DF of 10 from the content. When DFs are greater, information hasbecome greater, louder, stronger than content. When DF is high, we call thisclownpants, whether the distraction results from too much or too little physicalinformation, since no-pants can be as distracting as clownpants. Recall those SoundEffect Entropy measurements for Subjects 6 and 11 as 0: the resulting DFs from thislow-entropy component are perfect tens (DFSE¼ 10) on the CPI.

If DFs of all physical attributes are all high, or all low, no emphasis has been made.The PowerPoint engineer has merely delivered content flatly, and likely as effectivelyas reading that content from the text with no vocal inflections. Some distraction is goodbecause it creates emphasis. Building too many distractions or surprises onto everyslide, makes your information predictable, but noticing discontinuities (Augst andO’Connor, 1999) or change in visual fields (Watt, 1979) generates higher viewerattention.

Concluding thoughts

There are more than one hundred elements [to comedy], but the most important is the elementof surprise. Boo! (Idle, 1999, p. 122).

For perception, surprise, as in Figure 3, is associated with the peak of the curve (Kearnsand O’Connor, 2004). Ordinarily, entropy is a measure of structure that rises from 0 tonear complete chaos as it approaches 1. However, another way of expressing the notionof entropy is to say that it is inversely proportional to the likelihood of occurrence, or asClaude Shannon said “information is the negative reciprocal value of probability.” Withletters and words, we have some sense of the likelihood of occurrence (we know “e” willappear much more frequently than “w” and that “the” will appear more frequently than“kayak” in general use, though in a book on boating, “kayak” would be expected). Atzero, the structure of a joke, or a visual presentation, or any message would exhibit nosurprise; while at or near one, surprises would be so frequent as to become ordinary.One might say at the middle of the curve, there is sufficient familiarity for a changeof structure to be surprising. Thus, the calculated DFs are high at either end of thecurve because neither stasis nor constant change presents surprise. The structural

538

JDOC70,4

DF

CO

DF

CR

DF

TI

DF

SE

DF

AD

DF

WI

DF

WP

DF

VT

DF

WT

DF

AI

Su

bje

ct01

5.75

920

4.43

312

7.26

394

0.71

228

4.24

394

3.97

244

7.44

558

2.95

572

4.11

286

3.72

914

Su

bje

ct02

7.51

526

1.84

348

7.26

394

0.71

228

7.95

934

4.22

054

0.57

068

107.

1730

20.

8170

4S

ub

ject

037.

7327

67.

9913

07.

4999

410

6.83

008

5.69

198

1.86

608

3.35

614

6.07

808

0.56

642

Su

bje

ct04

4.84

538

1.19

630

4.84

916

0.71

228

5.55

592

4.61

332

0.52

528

2.5

5.43

300

2.36

218

Su

bje

ct05

6.47

314

6.37

482

7.26

394

2.79

598

4.53

676

4.34

716

2.40

134

2.95

572

0.56

642

2.97

584

Su

bje

ct06

7.24

974

6.94

158

7.69

860

103.

9601

43.

4726

42.

0343

23.

7101

27.

9587

63.

3561

4S

ub

ject

074.

7852

03.

2448

6–

1.15

642

3.48

490

4.61

024

0.60

394

–6.

7516

63.

4782

2S

ub

ject

085.

9545

85.

9582

27.

6986

01.

3834

610

3.93

460.

1941

81.

0566

25.

8434

0–

Su

bje

ct09

6.36

424

6.42

026

0.71

228

0.71

228

4.12

976

4.16

534

0.48

794

106.

2643

02.

4525

6S

ub

ject

108.

3830

28.

3662

27.

4999

4–

64.

0136

02.

2005

03.

3561

47.

9614

40

Su

bje

ct11

3.37

240

1.88

796

7.26

394

103.

5149

03.

6634

62.

8252

62.

9557

24.

2801

63.

5149

0S

ub

ject

127.

3873

27.

1183

47.

2639

4–

3.35

614

3.59

204

0.78

236

2.95

572

6.10

106

3.35

614

Su

bje

ct13

5.30

626

2.62

316

2.79

598

1.15

642

4.09

408

4.62

904

2.03

432

0.77

308

6.92

950

3.36

616

Su

bje

ct14

8.11

380

7.88

732

7.69

860

1.38

346

8.33

038

3.54

426

1.38

346

0.34

094

7.95

338

0.81

704

Su

bje

ct15

7.21

030

6.44

498

7.26

394

0.71

228

7.98

542

3.53

716

0.98

904

2.95

572

7.40

504

0.86

032

Su

bje

ct16

6.21

934

6.46

512

4.84

916

1.15

642

3.51

346

4.10

484

0.98

904

3.77

444

4.46

244

3.47

834

Su

bje

ct17

6.79

064

5.59

290

7.49

994

0.61

404

7.88

672

3.59

836

0.20

284

0.57

542

6.61

682

0.56

642

Su

bje

ct18

7.49

070

4.78

462

–0.

7122

83.

3762

4.29

818

0.99

370

–7.

3390

43.

3762

0S

ub

ject

197.

2590

64.

9303

67.

4999

41.

0566

24.

1937

84.

4620

42.

4013

40

6.92

280

4.19

378

Su

bje

ct20

4.24

576

2.63

254

7.26

394

3.35

614

3.33

884

4.13

848

0.13

684

6.97

912

0.35

588

3.55

780

Su

bje

ct21

5.53

950

1.75

964

7.69

860

0.52

528

4.47

638

3.90

452

3.08

122

106.

4503

63.

7472

0S

ub

ject

226.

4143

65.

2451

87.

4999

40.

2243

86.

6465

24.

4968

40.

2028

43.

3561

46.

8110

41.

6163

2S

ub

ject

236.

8464

06.

5287

87.

6986

00.

5664

24.

5340

23.

8864

42.

6431

010

4.76

880

3.58

202

Su

bje

ct24

7.03

466

1.65

794

–3.

3561

44.

9963

810

0.43

918

–3.

8720

60.

9934

8

Table V.Distraction factors

calculated for ten formattributes of 24

PowerPoint presentations

539


Figure 2.Visual representationsof distraction factorsfor Subjects 1, 9, 16,and 23

Dis

trac

tion

Fac

tors

for

Sub

ject

1

012345678910

HCO

HCR

HTI

HSE

HAD

HWI

HWP

HVT

HWT

HAI

Ent

ropy

CPI

Dis

trac

tion

Fac

tors

for

Sub

ject

9

012345678910

HCO

HCR

HTI

HSE

HAD

HWI

HWP

HVT

HWT

HAI

Ent

ropy

CPI

Dis

trac

tion

Fac

tor

for

Sub

ject

16

012345678910

HCO

HCR

HTI

HSE

HAD

HWI

HWP

HVT

HWT

HAI

Ent

ropy

CPI

Dis

trac

tion

Fac

tor

for

Sub

ject

23

012345678910

HCO

HCR

HTI

HSE

HAD

HWI

HWP

HVT

HWT

HAI

Ent

ropy

CPI

540

JDOC70,4

presentation of the message does not change even when the viewer changes, but maybe perceived by different viewers as having different meaning. Some viewers maypossess more of the code for understanding the message. One person’s template ofprobabilities may be another person’s noise (Kearns et al., 2007).

As is the case of clownpants and the Powerpoint presentation: that which fallsoutside the parameters of regular or normal or common to that presenter is whatcreates the entropic burst. When the engineer attempts to fill the presentation withentropic bursts, he or she is merely changing the baseline scale of normal or regular forthat presentation and consequently altering the pretence under which the entropicburst can occur, thusly, like in joke telling, eliciting from the audience a willingsuspension of disbelief of what may be normal through audial and temporal signals.

Even as far back as the first time this joke was told, people were aware of theimportance of structure in the construction of humor, at least the temporal dimension(Idle, 1999):

“Ask me the secret of comedy.”“What is the secret of–”“Timing.”

Distraction is a measurable characteristic of the structure of PowerPoint documents.We present the concept of entropy measures of document structures and thecorollary DFs as precise quantitative ways to speak about documents. This does notmean that there is one or some small set of “perfect” structures for engineeringvisual, multimedia presentations, nor is there a formula to ensure distraction-freepresentations, especially since the meaning is also dependent on the viewer.Comedians are funny not because they use a commonly accepted arrangement ofwords, but because they understand the set of structures of what entertains. Thosewho construct visual presentations might do well to erase the barrier betweenentertainment and education.

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perceived entropy ishigh in the middle

and low at the extremes

Figure 3.Perceived entropy is

high in the middle (0.5)and entropy is low as it

reaches either extreme

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Corresponding authorDr Jodi Kearns can be contacted at: [email protected]

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