[Sigia-l] The art of reading

[Listera]

What if your "virtual desk" was as just big as your real desk? How would
that change your behavior? Dr. Chi, of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
in California, has found out one thing already. Almost all his reading -
text messages, e-mails, journal articles, even books - is done on-screen.
 
The reading experience online "should be better than on paper," Chi says.
He's part of a group at PARC developing what it calls ScentHighlights, which
uses artificial intelligence to go beyond highlighting your search words in
a text. It also highlights whole sections of text it determines you should
pay special attention to, as well as other words or phrases that it predicts
you'll be interested in. "Techniques like ScentHighlights are offering the
kind of reading that's above and beyond what paper can offer," Chi says.

ScentHighlights gets its name from a theory that proposes that people forage
for information much in the same way that animals forage in the wild.
"Certain plants emit a scent in order to attract birds and bees to come to
them," Chi says. ScentHighlights uncovers the "scent" that bits of
information give off and attract readers to it.

If the reader types in "Wimbledon tennis," for example, ScentHighlights
would highlight each word in its own color in the text, as search programs
do. But ScentHighlights adds additional keywords in gray that the system has
inferred that the reader would be interested in (perhaps "US Open" or "Andy
Roddick"). It would also highlight in yellow entire sentences that it deems
likely to be especially relevant.

To do this, ScentHighlights combines two approaches, noticing how often
words are near each other in text and using a technique called "spreading
activation." Chi says: "It basically mimics how humans retrieve
information." ScentHighlights actually knows nothing about tennis, he says.
"It's a purely statistically based technique."

How the Web changes your reading habits
<http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0623/p13s02-stin.html>

Is this a good thing? How far should we go in *directing* how people read?
How far do we go in "engineering" reading experience?

Ziya
Nullius in Verba