Dynamic Hypertext Benefits Novices in Question Answering

This paper reports on an experimental comparison of static and dynamic hypertext. The static hypertext consisted of an online Bible with links defined by Thompson's Bible Chain References. The dynamic hypertext used the same content, but links were created dynamically by a search algorithm. In terms of task time and accuracy, overall performance was better in the dynamic hypertext condition. In addition, novices seemed to benefit more from the dynamic hypertext than did Bible experts. These results demonstrate that dynamic hypertext, using a querying approach, may sometimes be superior to static hypertext for some tasks. Thus dynamic hypertext, which requires no authoring effort, is an attractive alternative to the labor-intensive static hypertext that has been prevalent in the past.