LitForager: Exploring Multimodal Literature Foraging Strategies in Immersive Sensemaking

2025-08-20

AI Summary

The exponential growth of academic literature poses dual challenges for researchers: information foraging—i.e., discovering and collecting relevant works—and sensemaking—i.e., organizing and interpreting them. While existing immersive analytical tools demonstrate cognitive advantages in the sensemaking phase, they lack systematic support for information foraging. This paper bridges that gap by integrating information foraging theory into immersive scholarly exploration for the first time. We propose a WebXR-based 3D literature network visualization system featuring multimodal interaction (gaze, gesture, and controller input), exploration guidance mechanisms, and spatial memory augmentation strategies to enable seamless transitions from discovery to structured organization. A formative evaluation with 15 researchers demonstrates significant improvements in exploration fluency, spatial cognitive efficiency, and adaptability to dynamic foraging strategies. Our work establishes a scalable methodological and technical framework for immersive scholarly analytics.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Conversational Systems for Recommendation & Retrieval
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Geometric, Spatial, and Temporal Reasoning

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data visualization
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web query analysis, representation and understanding
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Graph embeddings and representation learning for Web-related graphs

Abstract

Exploring and comprehending relevant academic literature is a vital yet challenging task for researchers, especially given the rapid expansion in research publications. This task fundamentally involves sensemaking - interpreting complex, scattered information sources to build understanding. While emerging immersive analytics tools have shown cognitive benefits like enhanced spatial memory and reduced mental load, they predominantly focus on information synthesis (e.g., organizing known documents). In contrast, the equally important information foraging phase - discovering and gathering relevant literature - remains underexplored within immersive environments, hindering a complete sensemaking workflow. To bridge this gap, we introduce LitForager, an interactive literature exploration tool designed to facilitate information foraging of research literature within an immersive sensemaking workflow using network-based visualizations and multimodal interactions. Developed with WebXR and informed by a formative study with researchers, LitForager supports exploration guidance, spatial organization, and seamless transition through a 3D literature network. An observational user study with 15 researchers demonstrated LitForager's effectiveness in supporting fluid foraging strategies and spatial sensemaking through its multimodal interface.

Problem

• Addressing underexplored information foraging in immersive academic literature exploration
• Bridging the gap between literature discovery and synthesis in sensemaking workflows
• Facilitating multimodal interaction for spatial organization of research literature networks

Innovation

• Immersive literature foraging with network visualizations
• Multimodal interactions for spatial sensemaking workflow
• 3D WebXR environment for exploratory guidance