Discovering and representing the contextual and narrative structure of e-books to support reading and comprehension (abstract only)
Yixing Sun · 2004
A person reading a book needs to build an understanding based on the available textual materials. As a result of a survey of users' reading behaviours and of existing e-Book user interfaces, we found that most of these interfaces provide poor support for the actual processes of reading and comprehension. In particular, there is generally minimal support for understanding the overall structure (or contextual structure) and the narrative structure of a book. We propose adapting topic tracking and detection techniques to discover the narrative threads within a book, and hence its narrative structure. The contextual and narrative structures will be presented to the user through purpose-designed visualisations, which will be integrated and linked within a newly developed e-Book browser. We have chosen to use the Bible as our test corpus, as it has a rich narrative structure, and relatively complex contextual structure. Evaluation of the interface, and its components, will be done through field studies involving actual readers of the Bible, to assess the effectiveness of the user interface in enhancing a user's experience.