Augmenting Scholarly Reading with Cross-Media Annotations

Abstract

Scholarly reading often involves engaging with various supplementary materials beyond PDFs to support understanding. In practice, scholars frequently incorporate such external materials into their reading workflow through annotation. However, most existing PDF annotation tools support only a limited range of media types for embedding annotations in PDF documents. This paper investigates cross-media annotation as a design space for augmenting academic reading. We present a design exploration of a cross-media annotation tool that allows scholars to easily link PDF content with other documents and materials such as audio, video or web pages. The proposed design has the potential to enrich reading practices and enable scholars to guide and support other researchers' reading experiences.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: The central PDF viewer serves as the primary space for reading and annotation, while external materials consulted during reading are displayed on both sides (web pages and videos on the left, other PDF documents on the right). Scholars can highlight content in the main PDF that requires additional support (A). By dragging a block or segment from an external resource onto the corresponding highlight, a pop-up widget representing the linked material is created in the PDF view (B). A single highlight may be linked to multiple external resources, forming one-to-many relationships (C). The interface supports both cross-document and cross-media annotations, including connections to web pages and video segments (D), as well as basic user-generated comment annotations (E).
• Figure 2: Cross-media annotation tool architecture