A Document Corpus Browser For In-Depth Reading

Software tools, including Web browsers, e-books, electronic document formats. search engines, and digital libraries are changing the way people read, making it easier for them to find and view documents. However, while these tools provide significant help with short-term reading projects involving small numbers of documents, they provide less help with longer-term reading projects, in which a topic is to be understood in depth by reading many documents. For such projects, readers must find and manage many documents and citations, remember what has been read, and prioritize what to read next. This paper describes three integrated software tools that facilitate in-depth reading. A first tool extracts citation information from documents. A second finds on-line documents from their citations. The last is a document corpus browser that uses a zoomable user interface to show a corpus at multiple granularities while supporting reading tasks that take days, weeks, or longer. We describe these tools and the design principles that motivated them.