Close Reading Tool
Overview
In this project, I investigated digital opportunities for close reading using a probe of a graphical user interface that I designed as a proof of concept. Using qualitative research, I examined the ideas and assumptions about the benefits of the proposed tool in terms of their feasibility and to understand how realistic it is to develop and how desirable and useful it will be for the potential users.
My Role: User research, Prototyping, Front-end programming
Tools: Adobe Illustrator, Axure RP, Spyder (Python)
Timeline: November 2020 - November 2021
Deliverables: Interactive Axure RP prototype, Interactive GUI in wxPython, Research findings
Team: Sevda AbdollahiNami, Luca Ducceschi, supervised by Prof. Massimo Zancanaro
The Challenge
Close reading is a way to analyze a text that focuses on the most important parts or patterns to help you understand texts that are hard to understand. Teachers of literature and language often use it to get students to pay attention to the text itself. But it takes a lot of time and is hard, which can be frustrating for students. This is why they need help with close reading.
Natural language processing (NLP) has come a long way, so many digital tools have been made to help analyze text. Yet, these technologies are still only used by language and computer science experts. So, the goal of this project was to find new ways to use NLP techniques to get people to read closely by making the process easier, more enjoyable, and easier to understand.
Project outline
Lean Ux Framework
In this project, the Lean UX framework was used to get early feedback from users by showing them an early design concept, cutting down on waste, and making a user-centered product.
Step1: making hypotheses
Step2: prototyping the proof of concept
Step3: user research and testing
Step 4: analyzing the results
Step 5: redesigning the prototype
Think
Making Hypotheses
We started the project around two main hypotheses:
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Techniques of natural language processing (NLP) may support a traditional close reading approach by offering new ways to explore the critical reading of a single text.
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The current tools developed in the field of Digital Humanities still require much more than computational thinking, and they are still limited to specialists trained in both linguistics and computer science.
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So, we decided to test our hypotheses by developing a graphical user interface as proof of concept. In this way, we could familiarize the participants with the concept and understand the abilities of the NLP package. We wanted to use the initial design concept as a probe to:
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Prompt the discussion among humanities students and teachers,
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Examine the assumptions about the benefits of the proposed tool in terms of their feasibility,
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Understand how realistic it is to develop and how desirable and useful it will be.
Make
Prototyping the Proof of Concept
After defining the assumptions, we created a prototype to translate the abstract concept into a simple tool and familiarize the participants with the idea. Our focus was to build the most basic version of the concept, test it, and abandon it if there were no valuable results. We decided to make a functional prototype in Python because, in this way, we could also test the features of Stanza (a python NLP package for human languages). Prof. Ducceschi developed the back-end of the prototype, and I developed its GUI using wxPython. Before implementing the interface in Python, first, I designed several prototypes using Axure RP to find the appropriate UI for the tool, considering the limitations of the wxPython.
The developed tool (prototype) is a simple application that enables users to annotate the text by selecting word categories using filter buttons and visualizing them using lens buttons.
The interface of the tool is similar to a typical e-book reader, but it includes enhanced text annotation functionalities. It is built around a series of modular filters that extract text fragments and a set of modular lenses that display the filters on digital text.
Check
Recruiting Participants
I started by recruiting the participants, who are educators and students in linguistics and literature, as potential users of the tool. I used different approaches to recruit them:
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I asked friends, classmates, and other knowns to recommend potential participants. For example, one of my friends is a literature student, and he also introduced some of his classmates, and we had a focus group, which is considered a snowball sampling.
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I sent invitation emails to the professors at our university or other universities.
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I went to the department of huminites in Trento and asked the students who were there if they were willing to participate in a focus group.
I managed to interview ten educators and conduct five focus groups with 17 students.
Focus Groups
I conducted focus groups with students to get a variety of perspectives. I chose focus groups because group conversations are more interactive, members balance each other, and they might encourage each other to speak up.
Semi-structured Interviews
Since it was impossible to organize focus groups with educators due to their busy schedules, I opted for semi-structured interviews.
Interviews helped delve deeper into the topic, and the teachers and professors gave critical feedback and other useful insights.
Interview Guide
In both semi-structured interviews and focus groups, first, I presented the tool to the participants to make them familiar with the concept. Then I asked a couple of open-ended questions to:
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Capture the reactions of users to the developed probe
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Investigate participants’ existing technology practices
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Understand the problems that participants face while doing their tasks
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Learn specific details that the proposed tool might help them to solve their problems
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Discover participants’ desired functionalities and things they would like to have with the current tool.
Think
Thematic Analysis
After collecting and transcribing the data, I analyzed it with Thematic analysis. It is a method for identifying, analyzing, and reporting patterns within data. I chose this method because not only does it organize and describe the data set in rich detail, but it also interprets various aspects of the research topic.
Thematic Map
The findings identified a model consisting of five interrelated themes that served as the fundamental embodiment of people’s views and opinions about the concept. I detected five main themes:
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Usage of the tool, describing how the tool can help users;
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User practice, representing the tasks, goals, and circumstances that users are now involved with while studying or teaching literature;
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User problem, demonstrating the target users and their capabilities and constraints on the existing products;
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Desired functionality, representing users’ product ideas based on their individual needs;
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Tool problem, explaining potential issues that might cause the tool not to be used.
Solving the User Problems With the Tool
Based on the results of the research, I identified that the core concept, the presented tool, can already solve some of the problems of the students and teachers:
Grammar understanding
Some students struggle to comprehend grammatical principles; whether they are learning a foreign language or a language they are already familiar with it. Recognizing verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and other parts of speech in sentences, as well as knowing the order of the syntactic constituents of a language, are examples of these problems. On the other hand, the tool could assist students in comprehending the grammar rules employed in a text. Consequently, the tool can be considered a solution for assisting students and educators in resolving students' difficulties with grammatical comprehension.
Vibe of the classroom
Some of the educators have difficulty maintaining a positive classroom atmosphere. Building relationships with students, keeping the classroom interactive, engaging students to participate in class discussions, maintaining all students' attention, concentration, and commitment, getting students interested in the topic and making students feel the need to study specific topics are all problems that need to be addressed. These issues appear to be caused by the employment of old, traditional, and tedious teaching methods. Thus, the tool could be considered as an attempt to improve the methods used to teach literature and linguistics to address the issue raised above. Using the tool can improve the relationship of the educators with students by bridging the gap between the students and teachers and creating a common ground. By creating an interactive classroom, it could help to avoid monotonousness in the classroom. Additionally, it could help keep the curiosity and interest of students high, create classroom discussions, and get students involved.
Assisting the Users in Their Activities
I learned that the tool can assist users in their practices and activities in the following ways:
Learning language
Since comprehending grammar is necessary for language learning, the tool can assist students in learning new languages, such as a foreign language or an old language like Greek or Latin. After studying grammar, students can improve their accuracy when writing and speaking in a new language. In other words, understanding the proper sentence structure of a foreign language enables individuals to construct clear and understandable sentences for native speakers. As a result, the tool can aid students in their language learning endeavors, by assisting them in comprehending grammar rules.
Comprehending complex texts
The tool has the potential to help students comprehend the texts by highlighting the writers' intentions and demystifying their writings. It would be instructive for students to compare how authors write today to how they wrote in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries. By reverse-engineering the sentences, it could lead students to discover and notice aspects they would not usually see, allowing them to see and understand them more quickly.
Home works
The tool may assist students in completing their homework by incorporating technology into their study routine or by introducing a new study method. For instance, when they study texts or research in preparation for writing a thesis. Additionally, it may assist students in recalling what they have learned.
Increase the accuracy
The tool may assist users in enhancing their accuracy; for instance, when students are skeptical about a term, such as while writing an essay, they can check and correct it. Additionally, it is difficult to discern the function of the words in the sentences. For example, depending on the context, a word ending in '-ing' could be a verb, a noun, or an adjective. As a result, because the tool indicates the function of the words in the sentence, it may benefit students to be confident in their analysis.
Self-study
Instead of relying on a tutor, someone who self-studies the language could use this tool to assess their performance or analyze a text to understand it better. For instance, when students are learning a grammar rule, such as infinitives, this can assist them in evaluating whether they have understood it correctly. Moreover, literature students could use it to evaluate their writing or assess their colleagues' work when criticizing each other's work.
Make
Redesigning the Prototype
Qualitative data suggested additional information about user requirements and ideas, which can be used to refine the concept and future product design. As a concept test, the project placed a greater emphasis on the user's perception of the concept idea than on how well the user executed a task. Although the existing concept is capable of resolving some of the users' issues and supporting them in performing their tasks, a more functional tool must be developed as future work, including the new features described in the following:
Exercise and practice
The tool could be capable of performing exercises and practices. It may enable educators to modify text for classroom use by adding a comment, a link to a video, or a link. Additionally, it can enable teachers to integrate numerous evaluation questions for students within books to aid with their reading. Evaluations may include multiple-choice or short-answer questions, true/false questions, and annotations. Teachers could share a book with their students and then annotate the text to track their progress through the pages.
Part of speech
The tool misses some parts of speech that could be added to the tool to perform the grammar analysis completely. These missing elements includes: 1) modifiers such as adverbs; 2) pronouns such as prepositions; 3) possessives; 4) articles; 5) transitive or intransitive verbs; 6) phrasal/prepositional verbs; 7) modality of verbs.
Access to digital books
Since students have difficulty obtaining digital copies of books, the tool might enable users to browse a variety of materials and books in addition to uploading their own books in a variety of formats to the repository.
Create community
The tool could have a feature that enables users to create a community within it; for instance, educators could utilize the platform jointly with students and keep track of their progress. Adding the ability to annotate text publicly, in addition to private annotations, could enable users to comment on, discuss, and ask questions about texts. The application may enable users to create groups for the purpose of sharing online content, resources, links, and annotations.
Input and output
The tool could enable users to upload files in a variety of formats, such as PDF files, Word documents, txt files, Google Docs, or websites, or paste text from various sources. The tool could include an option for uploading text via the phone's camera.
Additionally, when text is imported into the tool, the sentence structure must not be affected. Moreover, users may be able to export the results of their study digitally, such as in an excel file, or print them via a button. Users could be able to save their analysis results. Additionally, it can provide the results without displaying the buttons that allow people to share them.
Synonym of words
The tool could include a feature that provides synonyms for the words, allowing users to learn the definitions of unfamiliar terms.
Proficiency level
The tool could allow users to select the degrees of proficiency of words by categorizing them into A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, or C2 levels.
Other analysis
In addition to grammatical analysis, the tool could provide the ability to perform other types of analysis such as rhetorical analysis, stylistic analysis, semantic analysis, or Poetry analysis.
Despite its limitations, the experience has provided some important lessons learned for the development of NLP-supported textual analysis tools in the future. Therefore, the next phase of the project is to design a tool considering the lessons learned in this study. Then, summative usability testing can be undertaken to determine the success of specific design choices and to find and fix usability problems. Finally, a validation test can be conducted prior to the interface being published to the general user community to confirm that the majority of users can complete the tasks assigned to them while using the tool.