The reader's helper
Jamey Graham · 1999
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 information from documents. In this paper, a new document reading environment is introduced called the Readers HelperTM, which supports the reading of electronic and paper documents. The Readers Helper analyzes documents and produces a relevance score for each of the readers 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 ThumbarTM, 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.