A Design Space for Digital Augmentation of Reading

To comprehend a text readers can benefit from their capacity to bodily interact with the environment to construct the meaning of a text. Specifically, they use their perception, action, and emotion systems to gain a deeper understanding of the text. Readers’ mental simulations of perceptions, actions, and emotions associated with a text can therefore facilitate reading comprehension, motivation and learning. The digital augmentation of reading aims at the artificial enrichment of reading through digital media. This concept has the potential to digitally synchronise the text with the surrounding environment and to promote an embodied reading experience, effectively fostering comprehension and learning. To harness the potential, recent relevant work about digital augmentation of reading was reviewed and analysed in our ongoing research to construct a design space. The resulting design space aims to support researchers, designers or educators to systematically explore design parameters that enable the effective creation of embodied reading experiences. The under-explored configurations of the design space, as well as the most frequently used configuration patterns, are also identified to reveal trends and opportunities for future applications. The paper also exemplifies how the design space can be utilised.