Graham - 1999 - The reader's helper

referenceArchiveUUID: "3724e1a6-dc24-4c89-83ed-e60e00321bce"
fullTitle: "The reader's helper: a personalized document reading environment"
authors: ["Jamey Graham"]

https://doi.org/10.1145/302979.303139

An Augmented reading intended to help people read “horizontally”, rather than “vertically”—i.e. skimming across many documents to find relevant information (see Syntopic reading, Skillful reading is often non-linear). Key design elements include:

• a scoring model which helps readers decide which papers might be most relevant to their interests
• automatic highlighting of passages in a paper which might be most important, or relevant to reader interest
• a minimap which allows rapid navigation and orientation with respect to those highlights (or readers’ own)
• simple automatic summarization of a document as it relates to a specific quer

Similar core ideas recapitulated later, using modern transformer models, in Fok et al. - 2023 - Scim.

Curious to note that the author, Jamey Graham, now works at Apple (doing ML stuff…)