http://chi2010-cskach.blogspot.com/2011/01/reading-1-rolling-and-shooting-two.html
Paper Title: LiquidText, Active Reading through Multitouch Document Manipulation
Author: Craig Tashman
(Source: Georgia Tech website, vis GIS)
Venue: The origin of the dissertation is the CHI 2010 Doctoral Consortium in Atlanta, Georgia which met 10-15 April, 2010.
Summary: Mr. Tashman makes an argument that paper is a "poor active reading* medium" and that therefore efforts to emulate paper in electronic readers are therefore misguided. He then discusses his efforts towards an active reading medium that is not poor, called LiquidText. He gives a brief overview of the current state of his work, the objectives of an active reading medium, and further intended directions of research. This would initially involve more detailed understanding of the process of active reading, which would contribute to the advancement of HCI and further improvements to LiquidText.
Discussion: The most interesting aspect of the paper is speculation into the future of reading. I have never encountered the assertion that paper is a poor mechanism for reading in any form before, and that's what really grabbed my attention in this paper. I think I can see his point with respect to information retrieval although he and I may be working from slightly different definitions of reading, which I feel is suggested by his definition of active reading.
The primary fault of his work is that same assertion. I don't think it is fair to characterize paper as poor in any respect for reading, when it is clearly superior to any alternative format that hasn't appeared within the last fifteen years. Certainly paper is not sacred, but "poor" takes it too far. Unfortunately, I do not feel sufficiently informed to comment on the merits of LiquidText itself, since the dissertation focused on the implementation of research rather than LiquidText.
The next move I would make in his position that he has not already outlined in the paper would be to attempt to remove the backlighting from LiquidText, at least when (if?) it is implemented as an independent reader rather than software. That would, in my opinion, eliminate the biggest weakness relative to paper for prolonged reading. Most of the outlined steps are also positive.
*Quoting his introduction: "Reading is not passive. For many knowledge workers, reading often entails annotation, information extraction, outlining, and complex navigation tasks. This type of reading is known as ‘active reading,’ and is a frequent occurrence for a wide range of knowledge workers." Just in case any of my readers want to know what "active reading" is defined as.
I love Craig's enthusiasm of wanting to replace an object that everyone uses in their everyday life with an improvement, I think that many requirements must be met in order to supersede paper. I agree with you that paper is no where near "poor" in respect to its job. I do like the technology proposed its just that I would want it to succeed, and in this case it just would be to expensive over paper.
ReplyDeletePaper may not be the most convenient medium for reading, but it's certainly easier on the eyes. Regardless of whether Tashman is right, paper is outdated. Why carry 1,000,000 books when one kindle will suffice?
ReplyDeleteI agree that paper is not necessarily a poor medium for reading since most novel that I have read are more interesting because of the images that I project in my mind while reading. I think however when he uses the word "poor" he means in the respect to the concept of active reading then paper can be poor related to the Liquidtext technology.
ReplyDeleteWell, the reason I use paper to take notes now is because I can't be trusted to do so when my medium has an internet connection...
ReplyDeleteI agree that there are many tasks where paper could be improved upon (although, as I said, I can't say without more info if LiquidText is it), I just think that calling it "poor" is overstating his case.