Interactive, Touch-screen Software and the Active Reading Phenomenon

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a software that facilitates an innovative approach to active reading - an interactive process that helps readers achieve better comprehension and recall of their reading materials. Taking advantage of touch-screen tablet computers, the LiquidText software - developed by Georgia Tech graduate student Craig Tashman and Keith Edwards, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing - enables active readers to interact with documents using finger motions.

LiquidText can significantly enhance the experiences of active readers, a group that includes students, lawyers, managers, corporate strategists and researchers.

"Most computer-based active reading software seeks to replicate the experience of paper, but paper has limitations, being in many ways inflexible," said Tashman.

"LiquidText offers readers a fluid-like representation of text so that users can restructure, revisualize and rearrange content to suit their needs."

The software can run on any Windows 7 touchscreen computer.

Details on LiquidText were presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in Vancouver, Canada.

Source-ANI