What is a mudoc anyway?
The mudoc is an empowering personal product now being developed by The Mudoc Corporation. It's a product that most people may come to use and love. Indeed, it's a product that could become the world's most widely consumed information technology product.
A mudoc is an electronic publication with its text set in interactive movable type. The mudoc's interactive movable type will provide the reader with many choices in how the text is to be presented. The reader can have the text presented as visual text, aural text, or simultext (that is, the simultaneous presentation of visual text and aural text). The reader can have visual text presented in the usual way -- that is, as lines of print -- or can have the text presented in one of five mu formats (for saccading eyes, that is, eyes making successive fixations from one point to another) or one of five muvie formats (for stationary eyes). These formats are described in the monograph, "Text Set in the Mu Typography," and in the interactive movie, The Coming Revolution in Writing and Reading (which will soon be available on this website). With visual text, the reader can also make choices about such things as type size, typeface, color, presentation rate, and visual cues. Or, the reader can have the text presented aurally -- presented as speech sounds at any rate desired up to 700+ words per minute. Or, the reader can have the text presented as simultext, a presentation mode that will enable most individuals to teach themselves to read and will facilitate reading by those with neurological or cognitive disorders, disorders like dyslexia, aphasia, attention deficit disorder, and other impairments that impede comprehension.
Mudocs will be supported by extensive reference substructures on DVDs or other high capacity storage devices (see "Role of the DVD in the mudoc technology") that will enable each reader to function as an expert in the language used in the document. The mudoc reference substructures will give the reader easy and immediate access to extensive information about any word in the document. The reader will be able to consult the reference substructure to determine any word's origin and history, pronunciations, definitions, grammatical characteristics and requirements, synonyms, antonyms, homographs, homophones, and examples of use by many different writers. The information provided might include pictures, drawings, maps, charts, tables, computer graphics, voices, music, sound effects, and/or other descriptive tools that could help the reader understand the word. With dual-language reference substructures, most readers will be able to interpret or learn to read text in languages other than their native language.
The word mudoc is a contraction of meaning unit document. Unlike the text in conventional electronic documents, which consists of linear character strings, the text in mudocs is stored in a special digital format, the mudoc digital format. In this format, text consists of collections of logical word and/or character groupings called meaning units. (In English, meaning units are sentences and/or logical subdivisions of sentences.) Mudoc text consists of five sets of meaning units ranging in size from one line to a maximum of five lines. With the aid of the mudoc software (see "What the Mudoc Software Does for Readers"), the five sets are formatted by the writer (or a musetter) and then compressed into a single character string in the mudoc digital format. In most languages mudoc text will require only slightly more storage space than conventional character strings, but readers of mudocs can have the text presented in many ways that can't be done with conventional text. The wide array of presentation options offered by mudocs will enable each reader to assimilate text in ways that will optimize his or her own particular processing capabilities, however limited -- or however extensive -- those capabilities may be.
©1999, The Mudoc Corporation
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