FST Graduate Research Topic

Research Topic: designing and testing better e-reading tools
Suggested By: Jon Dron
Last Update: May 16th, 2025

A number of studies have revealed that reading from screens tends to lead to less retention and comprehension than reading from equivalent paper versions of the same text. While the vast majority of such studies are very flawed indeed, typically failing to distinguish between use of dedicated e-readers, tablets, cell phones, laptop, and desktop computers, rarely making allowances for texts designed for e-reading (treating PDFs and epubs as though they were equivalent), seldom taking the reading population, topic, or presentation into account, using measures that were designed specifically for paper, and so on, there is, at heart, a good theoretical basis for the problem: that paper provides better context. When we read from paper, especially from books, we are constantly and usually unconcsiously aware of where we are in the text and, on the page itself, we remember passages not just from the words but from the shapes they make on the page and even from marks on the pages, from flaws in printing to annotations we or other readers have made to inconsistencies in the paper itself. There may also be physical cues, like the feel of the bend of the page or weight in our hands (which varies according to where you are in the book) or even the creasing of the spine.T aken together, such cues take advantage of our natural capability to distinguish objects and locations, that tend to be lost when e-reading, especially when (as in epub and similar formats) text reflows constantly, seldom looking the same way twice. For this project I would like the researcher to investigate existing literature on reading comprehension/retention in electronic and physical texts, with a critical eye, in order to identify unsolved problems, underlying patterns, and/or weaknesses in the studies design and build potential solutions (more on that below) design and to perform at least preliminary tests to discover whether they improve retention Depending on the context, researchers may perform a subset of this overall research program - the literature review, the design and construction, and the testing are in principle separable. Possible interventions include (but are not limited to): providing unique watermarks based on the surrounding text. For example, a hash value could be derived from each paragraph and used to generate a random graphic displayed (very faintly!) underneath it. very subtle modifications to the characters of each word, again derived from hash values of the word and those that surround it (the surroundings are very important - the idea is to make every word, even when it is the same word, look a little different from every other whenever it is used). This could be so subtle that you would need a magnifier to see any difference at all. However, when taken as a whole, each word would be just a tiny bit different than any other instance of its use, and the patterns of each sentence would be distinctive. similar to the watermark, a very subtle overlay (likely in the same colour as the background) that would achieve a similar effect to modifying the individual characters. One benefit of this is that it would slightly increase the cognitive load of the reader, which has been shown to have a positive effect on retention when not done to extremes. I welcome other creative and alternative ways of addressing the problem - there are all sorts of possible variables that could be adjusted such as colour, tone, brightness, line pitch, character spacing, and so on, and likely other ways to reduce the problems (one existing partial solution that has been tried for over 30 years is to provide progress bars and/or skeuomorphic representations of the surrounding pages in a book to indicate position). There are multiple complexities relating to how layouts are affected when character size, spacing, or fonts are changed (e.g. relating to ways the text spreads across pages, line lengths alter, etc) and almost certainly differences relating to different devices and screen resolutions/sizes/types, so there is likely enough scope in this area for at least one PhD or multiple different projects. If it were discovered that any of the interventions improved retention and comprehension, there are also many potential further projects to refine, compare, and adapt such solutions to a broader context. An attempt has already been made to build this, but the work is very incomplete and much more remains to be done. It may, though, be useful as the basis for further work. We have also written a paper describing the project that may provide useful references and a fuller description of the problem. There are opportunities for publication, should the student be interested.