The reader's helper: a personalized document reading environment

  • Authors:

  • Jamey Graham

  • Affiliations:

  • California Research Center, Ricoh Silicon Valley, Inc., 2882 Sand Hill Road, Suite 115, Menlo Park, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Over the last two centuries, reading styles have shifted awayfrom the reading of documents from beginning to end and toward theskimming of documents in search of relevant information. This trendcontinues today where readers, often confronted with aninsurmountable amount of text, seek more efficient methods ofextracting relevant information from documents. In this paper, anew document reading environment is introduced called the ReadersHelperTM, which supports the reading of electronic and paperdocuments. The Readers Helper analyzes documents and produces arelevance score for each of the readers topics of interest, therebyhelping the reader decide whether the document is actually worthskimming or reading. Moreover, during the analysis process, topicof interest phrases are automatically annotated to help the readerquickly locate relevant information. A new informationvisualization tool, called the ThumbarTM, is used in conjunctionwith relevancy scoring and automatic annotation to portray acontinuous, dynamic thumb-nail representation of the document. Thisfurther supports rapid navigation of the text.