Comments for learn.5tein.com

Comment on A Diagram of Reading Media by Jared Stein

Jared Stein — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 21:35:38 +0000

This was mostly for my own benefit, but I’ll draft some explanatory notes with examples.

Comment on Forced mouse tracking of reading behavior by Jared Stein

Jared Stein — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 21:34:36 +0000

I’ll have to read more about past studies using light pens to see if its worth scripting this. I have some ideas about how to ‘blur’ the surrounding content, but it will take some experimentation to get it to work nicely across browsers.

Comment on DIY Eyetracking by Jared Stein

Jared Stein — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 21:33:22 +0000

I asked that exact question on the forum in order to get an idea of stability. There is another DIY rig that does show relative sizes, and it looks like it’s about as wide as a single 21″ monitor.

Comment on DIY Eyetracking by Charles Graham

Charles Graham — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 20:11:00 +0000

It is great that the eye tracking is becoming cheaper and cheaper to build. One thing about this setup is that it was really hard to get a sense of scale – how big the setup was. I even went to the website and it still was not clear. It would have been nice to have a picture of a laptop or hand or something in the picture to be able to understand the relative size.

crg

Comment on Forced mouse tracking of reading behavior by Charles Graham

Charles Graham — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 20:04:29 +0000

This is an interesting idea. I assume that you can change the shape of the focus area – for example a rectangular focus area would be much better than a circular one I think. I also wonder if you can change the amount of blur in the unfocused areas. If so, I would try to make it almost visible but just blurry enough that it would take extra energy to read without the focus area. This would allow them to still see some of the big picture things related to the context but nudge them towards using the mouse.

crg

Comment on A Diagram of Reading Media by Charles Graham

Charles Graham — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 19:59:50 +0000

I’m not clear on the distinctions between the types of digital text from the image alone.

Comment on Forced mouse tracking of reading behavior by admin

admin — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 20:50:33 +0000

Just found out that research on reading was conducted in the 70s and 80s using a similar method, but a different tool: the “light pen” in a darkened environment.

Comment on Challenges for online reading researchers by Jared Stein

Jared Stein — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 14:23:42 +0000

Yes, if tablet-like devices become de rigeur for 21c reading, research methods that limit themselves to PC-based reading–whether laptop or desktop–will be missing the boat.

Thankfully, eyetracking may in fact be possible via tablets like the iPad, though not in the current incarnations. This would likely happen by conscious decision of the manufacturers to include eyetracking user interaction. Hardware-wise this would likely mean embedding one or two discreet infrared lights on the surface, and possibly a second user-facing camera to track head motion. The user would train the system, and the system would try to auto-calibrate at the beginning of each session.

Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see eye-based user interaction in tablets in the next 5 years. And though the intention will be for users to more easily accomplish tasks on the computer, researchers should be able to exploit this technology to study things like reading (though knowing Apple, probably not hackable on the iOS–bring on the Android tablets!).

Comment on Challenges for online reading researchers by Charles Graham

Charles Graham — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 13:34:18 +0000

It is good to document these ideas when you have them. Then you can go back and add to, remove, and sort through them from time to time.

The mobile computing issue is an interesting one. It is becoming an increasing way for people to access and read information – consider the proliferation of ipads and ereaders. In these contexts you don’t have the luxury of even being able to do mouse tracking and I’m not sure how practical eye tracking would even be – though the new ipads do have a video camera on them that could be used if you figured out how to track eye movement with the camera.

crg

Comment on Logical arguments of tracking reading by Charles Graham

Charles Graham — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 13:28:54 +0000

You said:

“As with all theories, we can not logically verify that reading is occurring by observing user activity; we can only hope to falsify that reading is occurring. However, I am optimistic that through consistent lack of falsification we can come to a reasonable, inductive assumption about when reading is occurring, and substantiate that assumption with assessment of reading comprehension.”

I like how clear your argumentation is getting here. With the falsification approach you can likely show times when reading is clearly NOT occurring. However, it is more difficult to prove when reading IS occurring.

I think that part of what you need to do is to establish a reasonable correlation between eye movement patterns and comprehension. Once this reasonable correlation is established then you can stop the more time consuming comprehension measurement and use just the eye tracking as a proxy. The logic is similar for moving from eye tracking to mouse tracking.

crg