CrowdHiLite: A Peer Review Service to Support Serious Reading on the Screen

The advent of smart devices and consumerisation of IT has produced a significant and permanent shift away from print-based reading to digital reading. This, in turn, has changed people’s reading behaviours and suggests that adapted mechanisms should be considered to support digital reading. It is particularly important for novice readers who need to read in-depth scientific literature in their chosen field. In this paper, we propose CrowdHiLite, a peer review service that allows expert readers to provide suggestion on individual readers’ highlights to support their reading through the use of crowdsourcing technique. A demonstration was also provided to show how it would work in real world. A preliminary experiment comparing novice readers’ reading performance with expert-rated highlights and normal highlights on the same document found improved reading efficiency and comprehension with the former.