Feeling UISTful: An Interactive Portrait of Scholarly Authorship, Readership, and the In-Between

Abstract

We introduce UISTful, a system that turns reading activity into a collective portrait of a scholarly community. Readers explore a semantic globe of UIST papers and authors while the system records private reading traces that can be reviewed, reflected upon, curated, and published for others to replay. Inspired by the information flâneur, UISTful treats a reading trace as a camera through which readers frame and interpret what they read, casting reading as a creative and authorial process. Shared traces display the plurality of interpretations composed across the same scholarly landscape, while collective trace views reveal paths and concentrations of attention across the community, inviting UIST to see itself as an interactive system of papers, authors, readers, and their exchanges.