A model and environment for improving multimedia scholarly reading practices

The evolution of multimedia document production and diffusion technologies has lead to a significant spread of knowledge in form of pictures and recordings. However, scholarly reading tasks are still principally performed on textual contents. We argue that this is due to a lack of critical and structured tools: (1) to handle the wide spectrum of interpretive operations involved by the polymorphous scholarly reading process; (2) to perform these operations on a heterogeneous multimedia corpus. This firstly calls for identifying fundamental document requirements for such reading practices. Then, we present a flexible model and a software environment which enable the reader to structure, annotate, link, fragment, compare, freely organise and spatially lay out documents, and to prepare the writing of their critical comment. We eventually discuss experiments with humanities scholars, and explore new academic reading practices which take advantage of document engineering principles such as multimedia document structuring, publication or sharing.