J. Blustein's PhD Thesis in brief

What next?

It should be no surprise to anyone who has completed a thesis that the experiment could be improved through further iterations. The future work chapter of my thesis describes some of the experiments that I'd like to do. In particular I think that the experiment should be rerun with a longer reading time, and that the readers should be selected with more care. Perhaps readers should be more interested in the topics of the article, or have high spatial ability.

I am more interested in pursuing the new interface and annotation parts of the future work. If you found those sections of the thesis interesting then you might be interested in the following interface projects too:

Ricoh's Jamey Graham's Reader's Helper

I was impressed with the graphical overview of webpages and the obvious importance placed on improving readers experience with online text when I saw the presentation at CHI'99 of The Reader's Helper: A Personalized Document Reading Environment (pp. 481 - 488).

FXPAL's XLibris (a trademark of FXPAL)

From the abstract to the CHI'98 paper:

XLibris™ uses a commercial high-resolution pen tablet display along with a paper-like user interface to support the key affordances of paper for active reading: the reader can hold a scanned image of a page in his lap and mark on it with digital ink. To go beyond paper, XLibris™ monitors the free-form ink annotations made while reading, and uses these to organize and to search for information. Readers can review, sort and filter clippings of their annotated text in a "Reader's Notebook." XLibris™ also searches for material related to the annotated text, and displays links to similar documents unobtrusively in the margin.

I first saw XLibris at CHI'98 and then again at Hypertext '98. Bill Schilit has copies of some papers about the system available from his webpage.

Two new interface projects I've seen recently have left a deep impression on me:

The fluid links project from Xerox PARC: Polle Zellweger, Bay-Wei Chang, and Jock Mackinlay gave a paper and demonstration of awesome new methods of hypertext linking without removing context at Hypertext '98. The demos was even better at CHI'99.
Hyper Mochi sheet is an amazing dynamic editing and presentation environment.: See Hyper Mochi sheet: a predictive focusing interface for navigating and editing nested networks through a multi-focus distorion-oriented view by Masashi Toyoda, and Etsuya Shibayama in Proceeding of the CHI'99 conference on Human factors in computing systems: the CHI is the limit, 1999, Pages 504 - 511.

Some papers about those projects are available from the ACM Digital Libary.

J. Blustein's PhD Thesis in brief

What next?

See Also

`http://www.csd.uwo.ca/%7ejamie/Official/Proposal/next.html`