On LiquidText
I am an avid reader. But, lately I have put on a few pounds and have become quite lazy. My laziness not only affected my from day to day activities, but also my reading habits. I was lazy even to scroll back to a piece of text to clarify what the author meant. As a result, my comprehension and retention abilities have also taken a hit. This problem bothered me for a few days after which I decided to do something about it.
After thinking about it for a few days, I felt that that it would be cool to just grab arbitrary pieces of text from a document arrange them in a way that would make more sense to me. I built a prototype of the idea and then let life decide the fate of the project.
Today while browsing the internets, I can across a project/company/product called liquidtext. To understand the power of this idea, you should watch the demos. Basically, liquid text breaks the confines of the rigid paper text by allowing you to grab arbitrary pieces of text from a document, organizing and annotating those collected pieces in different ways and to occlude the selected portions of the document using multi touch gestures. In short, LiquidText makes an e-reader better than paper.
The real treasure on the website turned out to be the research papers. The best part of the papers was not the implementation of the liquidtext, but the background on why liquidtext was important. Turns out people spend about 27% of the time navigating, a document while reading it. Navigating a document, annotating and highlighting a document are common practices of avid readers. This technique of reading even has a name called "active reading". There is years of research that shows that this method is very effective and a lot of systems were designed to make this process simple. Craig Tashman, has done excellent background study and has built an excellent system. The only downside of the papers was lack of empirical evidence that show that liquidtext indeed is better for active learning.
While I am skeptical that this software is most useful on a 10" ipad screen, I am keenly waiting to get my hands on their product.