Reading Practices

Reading encompasses a broad range of complex and poorly understood practices involving documents. It is this set of practices that is supported in the active reading machine. Describe these practices and give scenarios that make your point.

Some of the activities and characteristics associated with reading include things such as the following.

• Flipping pages.
• Fast flip of pages in order to find a particular piece of information. For instance, one can flip very quickly through a book in order to find a given figure or table.
• Reading two pages at a time. For instance in a technical paper a paragraph may be explaining a figure which is shown in the next page.
• A book may open on a frequently browsed page.
• People use bookmarks and color/labeled tabs to signal pages or places in a document.
• It's possible to see how much a page has been seen by the physical state. For instance depending on how crumbled or dirty the page is, a person can induce the use frequency of reading that page.
• Get an idea of the TOTAL amount of information in the document by the size of the document or book. Persons typically expect to find more informaiton on a thick book than on a thiner one.
• Pages provided a chunk of text with a certain size. This allows to group concepts, divide the presentation of the information into manageable chunks.
• See how much of the book has been read. Noticing how think is the set of pages read and the set of pages that have not been read, gives an idea of where in the document one is.
• Get an approximate idea of the time required to read ALL the book, since the person can induce an approximated estimation of how much time does it take to read a page and how many pages are in a document.
• Reading is not associated with a particular place such as the office. It's possible to read in different locations.
• Reading is not a work related task but it is also done for pleasure. This implies to be able to read in comfortable positions such as lying on a bed or on the beach.
• Reading implies focusing the eyes in small targets. This is fatiguing for the eyes. Therefore an eye-firendly medium is prefered by the humans. This is one of the reasons, most persons print out documents in paper instead of reading them from the screen.
• The spatial property of paper is very important when reading. The relative position in a page can be used in order to code differente levels of relevance or group concepts togheter.
• Reading is most commonly done in a sequential fashion. Nevertheless there are many examples of non-sequential reading, such as footnotes and hypertexts, where non-sequential reading is required.

Some activities may seem desirable when reading. These activities are related with a broader task, such as authoring or correcting a technical article, where reading is also a sub-task.

• Reading implies focusing the eyes in small targets. Therfore it limits the activities the human can do. For instance, when driving a car and reading a map is necessary, this implies a switching back and forth from the map and to the road. Some sistems such as some airplaine's cockpit have head-up systems that allow to read information without loosing track of critical visual information.
• It's possible to underline, highlight and mark the text in different ways.
• It's possible to code degrees on the marks, for instance a heavy underline is made to be more notorious than a light underline.
• It is possible to make annotations next to a particular paragraph or idea in a document.

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