Design of an e-book user interface and visualizations to support reading for comprehension

ABSTRACT

Current e-Book browsers provide minimal support for comprehending the organization, narrative structure, and themes, of large complex books. In order to build an understanding of such books, readers should be provided with user interfaces that present, and relate, the organizational, narrative and thematic structures. We propose adapting information retrieval techniques for the purpose of discovering these structures, and sketch three distinctive visualizations for presenting these structures to the e-Book reader. These visualizations are presented within an initial design for an e-Book browser.

REFERENCES

• 1: David J. Harper , Ivan Koychev , Yixing Sun , Iain Pirie, Within-Document Retrieval: A User-Centred Evaluation of Relevance Profiling, Information Retrieval, v.7 n.3-4, p.265-290, September-December 2004 [doi>10.1023/B:INRT.0000011207.45988.bb]
• 2: Carthy, J. and M. Sherwood-Smith. Lexical Chains for Topic Tracking. In Proceedings of The IEEE International Conference on Systems Man and Cybernetics. 2002. Hammamet, Tunisia.
• 3: John Lamping , Ramana Rao, Visualizing large trees using the hyperbolic browser, Conference companion on Human factors in computing systems: common ground, p.388-389, April 13-18, 1996, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada [doi>10.1145/257089.257389]
• 4: Plaisant, C., R. Mushlin, A. Snyder, J. Li, D. Heller, and B. Shneiderman. LifeLines: Using Visualization to Enhance Navigation and Analysis of Patient Records. In Proceedings of American Medical Informatics Association Annual Fall Symposium (AMIA). 1998. Philadelphia, USA: Medical Publishers.p. 76--80.
• 5: StudyLight, http://www.studylight.org/con/, StudyLight.org.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
e-book, information retrieval, reading tasks, topic detection and tracking, visualization and user interface