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

2026-07-10

AI Summary

This work proposes UISTful, a novel system that reframes individual reading behavior as a form of creative authorship and translates it into a visual representation of collective scholarly cognition. Introducing the concept of the “information flâneur,” UISTful models reading as an exploratory, meaning-making activity and visualizes UIST papers and authors through a semantic globe. The system supports recording, replaying, curating, and sharing reading trajectories, integrating semantic mapping, trace tracking, interactive curation, and collective attention analysis. By constructing an interactive portrait of the academic community, UISTful not only fosters individual reflection but also reveals emergent group reading patterns and pluralistic interpretations, thereby foregrounding readers as active agents in scholarly communication.

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.

Problem

• scholarly authorship
• readership
• reading traces
• collective portrait
• interactive system

Innovation

• reading traces
• collective portrait
• semantic globe
• information flâneur
• interactive scholarship