LiquidText software supports active reading with fingertip gestures

Many reading tasks require individuals to not only read a document, but also to understand, learn from and retain the information in it. For this type of reading, experts recommend a process called active reading, which involves highlighting, outlining and taking notes on the text.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed software that facilitates an innovative approach to active reading. Taking advantage of touch-screen tablet computers, the LiquidText software 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 Georgia Tech graduate student Craig Tashman. "LiquidText offers readers a fluid-like representation of text so that users can restructure, revisualize and rearrange content to suit their needs."

LiquidText was developed by Tashman and Keith Edwards, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing. The software can run on any Windows 7 touchscreen computer.

Details on LiquidText were presented in May 2011 at the Association for Computing Machinery's annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in Vancouver, Canada. Development of LiquidText was supported by the National Science Foundation, Steelcase, Samsung and Dell.

Active reading demands more of the reading medium than simply advancing pages, Edwards noted. Active readers may need to create and find a variety of highlights and comments, and move rapidly among multiple sections of a document.