Multimedia Presentation of Grammatical Description: Design Issues

In this paper, I argue that grammatical description of language is a type of information which is ideally suited to presentation as a multimedia object structured with hypertext. I examine three existing language resources, constructed for different audiences, and discuss various features of each which bear on the design issues relevant to grammatical description. From my examination of these exemplars, I argue for four guidelines in the design of a multimedia grammar: data centricity, multiple linking, exhaustive coding in data structures, and user control of the amount of information accessed.