To take the analysis of cognitive dimensions beyond the intuitive, hand-waving stage, it is necessary to develop a meta-notation; that is, a notation in which to describe the structure of other notations.
Technical literature is 'viscous' (see page on cognitive dimensions) because it contains many internal dependencies between figure and section numbers, cross references, a contents list, and so on. Pascal is more viscous than Basic for the same reason.
To describe these internal dependencies David Benyon, now at Napier University, and I developed a version of entity-relationship modelling specifically for information artifacts. ER modelling is a well-understood formalism for data-base modelling and we have found it quite adaptable. The key is to consider an information display as a data-base in which there are internal associations. Some of my publications in this area:
Green, T. R. G. and Benyon, D. (1996.) The skull beneath the skin: entity-relationship
models of information artifacts. Int. J. Human-Computer Studies, 44(6)
801-828. Fetch pdf
Green, T. R. G. and Benyon, D. (1995) Displays as data structures: entity-relationship models of information artifacts. To appear in Nordby, K., Gilmore, D. J, and Arnesen, S. (1995) INTERACT-95. London: Chapman and Hall.
Whitelock, D., Green, T. R. G., Benyon, D., and Petre, M. (1994) Discourse during design: what people talk about and (maybe) why. In R. Oppermann, S. Bagnara and D. Benyon (Eds.) Proceedings of ECCE-7, Seventh European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics. Sankt Augustin: Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung MBH. GMD-Studien Nr 233.
Green, T. R. G. (1991) Describing information artifacts with cognitive dimensions and structure maps. In D. Diaper and N. V. Hammond (Eds.) Proceedings of HCIÕ91: 'Usability Now', Annual Conference of BCS Human-Computer Interaction Group. Cambridge University Press.