This doctoral dissertation applies user experience and complex systems theory, combining eye-tracking data with verbal and observational data from user test instances, to study the effectiveness of metadata records that accompany digital primary source objects available on The Portal to Texas History.

This dissertation traces imperialist ideology as it functions in the texts of two radical Liberal critics of imperialism, Leonard Woolf and E. M. Forster. In chapters two and three respectively, I read Woolf's autobiographical account Growing and his novel The Village in the Jungle to examine connections between "nonfictional" and "fictional" writing on colonialism. The autobiography's fictive texture compromises its claims to facticity and throws into relief the problematic nature of notions of truth and fact in colonialist epistemology and discursive systems.