2 What’s Wrong with Paper?

In this paper we report the findings from a field study of legal research in a first-tier law school and on the resulting redesign of XLibris, a next-generation e-book. We first characterize a work setting in which we expected an e-book to be a useful interface for reading and otherwise using a mix of physical and digital library materials, and explore what kinds of reading-related functionality would bring value to this setting. We do this by describing important aspects of legal research in a heterogeneous information environment, including mobility, reading, annotation, link following and writing practices, and their general implications for design. We then discuss how our work with a user community and an evolving e-book prototype allowed us to examine tandem issues of usability and utility, and to redesign an existing e-book user interface to suit the needs of law students. The study caused us to move away from the notion of a stand-alone reading device and toward the concept of a document laptop, a platform that would provide wireless access to information resources, as well as support a fuller spectrum of reading-related activities.

Existing e-book readers do not do a good job supporting many reading tasks that people perform, as ethnographers report that when reading, people frequently read from multiple display surfaces. In this paper we present our design of a dual-display e-book reader and explore how it can be used to interact with electronic documents. Our design supports embodied interactions like folding, flipping, and fanning for local/lightweight navigation. We also show how mechanisms like Space Filling Thumbnails can use the increased display space to aid global navigation. Lastly, the detachable faces in our design can facilitate inter-document operations and flexible layout of documents in the workspace. Semi-directed interviews with seven users found that dual-displays have the potential to improve the reading experience by supporting several local navigation tasks better than a single display device. Users also identified many reading tasks for which the device would be valuable. Users did not find the embodied interface particularly useful when reading in our controlled lab setting, however. Author Keywords E-book, reading, multiple display devices, embodied interfaces,

In this paper, we discuss the findings of an in-depth observational study of reading and within-document navigation and add to these findings the results of a second analysis of how people read comparable digital materials on the screen, given limited navigational functionality. We chose periodicals as our initial foil since they represent a type of material that invites many different kinds of reading and strategies for navigation. Using multiple sources of evidence from the data, we first characterize readers’ navigation strategies and specific practices as they make their way through the magazines. We then focus on two observed phenomena that occur when people read paper magazines, but are absent in their digital equivalents: the lightweight navigation that readers use unselfconsciously when they are reading a particular article and the approximate navigation readers engage in when they flip multiple pages at a time. Because page-turning is so basic and seems deceptively simple, we dissect the turn of a page, and use it to illustrate the importance and invisibility of lightweight navigation. Finally, we explore the significance of our results for navigational interfaces to digital library materials.

In this paper, we intend to approach two specific hypermedia aspects; the structure that organizes the hypertextual information, as well as the route of reading that the user creates when advancing the links of a net. Our hypothesis is that the labyrinth is present in hypermedia systems in two ways: the first, more evident, is in the own organization at the moment of the project development. The second, subtler, but not less profound, is the labyrinth that the reader is to construct when operating his choices in between the hypermedia chains. In this sense, our research will be oriented as of two principles, or two labyrinths: the potential labyrinth, present as a modular document with access "doors", "hyperlinks " to other documents; and the lived labyrinth, that which is experimented by the user at the moment of his navigation by "hyperspace". We will start our research from a revision of the theory of hypertext, to later outline parallels with the labyrinth.

Tabletop computer displays suffer from an orientation problem. Solutions based on competing approaches have been implemented, but there remain unanswered questions about the ideal solution. Within a context of interacting with documents on tabletop displays, requirements for orientation control were found by examining literature on how people use paper documents and what manipulations they perform. It was determined that control must provide quick, either-handed, low-attention manipulation of individual objects on the display. An evaluation of existing interaction techniques for rotation was performed in light of these criteria. The trade-off between two desirable characteristics, integral translation and rotation, and direct input, was examined. An evaluation of mouse-based techniques confirmed that integral input has the potential to be faster than the established sequential-manipulation techniques due to the time saved by overlapping manipulation of different degrees of freedom. For a single task combining translation and rotation the separable technique took twice as long compared to two separate tasks of the same translation or rotation, whereas the integral techniques took less time for the combined action than the two separate actions. However, the integral mouse-based techniques were too slow in their actual manipulation, with the scroll wheel taking four times as long to rotate than the separable technique, and the new drag technique not being used in an integral manner. It was concluded that the current generally available technology such as the mouse and single-point touch-sensitive overlays are inadequate. Acceptable tabletop orientation control will be dependent on the maturation of newer technologies based on tangible interfaces or possibly multi-finger input. Until then, interaction techniques for manipulating documents on tabletop displays should be chosen according to their ability to concurrently control position and orientation, such as three degree-of-freedom input devices on digitizing tablets.

In this paper we report the findings of a field study in a first-tier law school and on the resulting redesign of XLibris, a next-generation e-book. We characterize a work setting in which we expected an e-book to be useful, and explore what kinds of functionality would bring value to this setting. Working with a user community allowed us to examine tandem issues of XLibris usability and utility, and to redesign the interface to suit their needs. We describe important aspects of legal research, including mobility, reading, annotation, link following and writing practices. Based on this study, our redesign addressed issues of navigation, mobility, and form factor.

Almost all Web searches are carried out while the user is sitting at a conventional desktop computer, connected to the Internet. Although online, handheld, mobile search offers new possibilities, the fast-paced, focused style of interaction may not be appropriate for all user search needs. In this paper, we explore an alterative, relaxed style for web searching that asynchronously combines an offline handheld computer and an online desktop Personal Computer. We discuss the role and utility of such an approach, present a tool to meet these user needs and discuss its relation to other systems.

Users need more sophisticated tools to handle the growing number of image-based documents available in databases. In this paper, we present a system devoted to the editing and browsing of complex literary hypermedia including original manuscript documents and other handwritten sources. Editing capabilities allow the user to transcribe manuscript images in an interactive way and to encode the resulting textual representation by means of a logical markup language (based on the XML/TEI specification). Both representations (image and structured text) are tightly linked to facilitate the reading and the interpretation of documents. This text/image coupling scheme is an attempt to unify several layers of information in order to provide the user with a global vision of the work. Our system also supplies tools capable of processing and relating information stored both in images and structured texts. Finally, application-specific visualization techniques have been developed in order to provide users with a way to identify relationships between source documents and help them to navigate.

This paper proposes new extensions of the digital book concept together with the required approaches to support their automatic generation. Most best-sellers have often inspired other related products, sometimes in different media. Some of these can be merged into suitable forms to provide consumers with a better view and understanding of the original masterpiece: other texts about the original book, images, audio recordings or even films. Several standards and technologies, such as hypermedia, speech and language processing, and widely accessible PDAs, are nowadays available to make these experiences effective. A prototype of a Multimedia Enriched Digital Book (MEDB) is presented for reading, listening and viewing as well as for a text querying scenario. Within the scope of already available technologies, these are tangible visions for the very next years.