The Reader's Helper Project

• Overview
  Over the last two centuries, reading styles have shifted away from the reading of documents from beginning to end and toward the skimming of documents in search of relevant information. This trend continues today where readers, often confronted with an insurmountable amount of text, seek more efficient methods of extracting relevant nformation from documents. In this paper, a new document reading environment is introduced called the Reader's Helper, which supports the reading of electronic and paper documents. The Reader's Helper analyzes documents and produces a relevance score for each of the reader's topics of interest, thereby helping the reader decide whether the document is actually worth skimming or reading. Moreover, during the analysis process, topic of interest phrases are automatically annotated to help the reader quickly locate relevant information. A new information visualization tool, called the Thumbar^TM, is used in conjunction with relevancy scoring and automatic annotation to portray a continuous, dynamic thumb-nail representation of the document. This further supports rapid navigation of the text.

• Papers
  • The Reader's Helper: A Personalized Document Reading Environment, Jamey M. Graham, ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'99), May 1999 in Pittsburg, PA

• Videos (Windows Media Format)
  • Introduction (00:02:33) - introduces the viewer to the basics concepts of RH: topics, highlighting of phrases & the thumbar
  • Find Feature (00:01:03) - describes the special 'find' feature which highlights the keywords in the text and thumbar
  • Auto Topic (00:02:06) - describes the auto topic feature which works with search engines to automatically create topics based on search queries
  • FollowMe Topics (00:01:43) - describes the FollowMe Topics web site and how to import topics into RH
  • Placemarks (00:00:43) - describes automatic bookmark creation based on the presense of topics in web pages; users can then revisit a web page in the future based on the collection of placemarks associated with a topic