Text Analysis Using Large High-Resolution Displays

Large high-resolution displays (LHRDs) are entering into our daily life. Today, we already see them in installations where they display tailored applications, e.g. in exhibitions. However, while heavily studied under lab conditions, real-world applications for personal use, which utilize the extended screen space are rarely available. Thus, today's studies of LHRD are particularly designed to embrace the large screen space. In contrast, in this paper, we investigate a real-world application designed for researchers working on large text corpora to support them in deep text understanding. We conducted a study with 14 experts from the humanities and computational linguistics which solved a text analysis task using a standard desktop version on a 24 inch screen and an LHRD version on three 50 inch screens. Surprisingly, the smaller display condition outperformed the LHRD in terms of task completion time and error rate. While participants appreciated the overview provided by the large screen, qualitative feedback also revealed that the need for head movement and the scrolling mechanism decreased the usability of the LHRD condition.