Paper Forager

Paper Forager is a novel web-based system which allows users to rapidly explore large collections of research documents. One can imagine these same techniques working for other types of document collections as well.

Abstract

Paper Forager: Supporting the Rapid Exploration of Research Document Collections

Justin Matejka, Tovi Grossman, George Fitzmaurice

Graphics Interface Conference 2021

We present Paper Forager, a web-based system which allows users to rapidly explore large collections of research documents. Our sample corpus uses 5,055 papers published at the ACM CHI and UIST conferences. Paper Forager provides a visually based browsing experience, allowing users to identify papers of interest based on their graphical appearance, in addition to providing traditional faceted search techniques. A cloud-based architecture stores the papers as multi-resolution images, giving users immediate access to reading individual pages of a paper, thus reducing the transaction cost between finding, scanning, and reading papers of interest. Initial user feedback sessions elicited positive subjective feedback, while a 24-month external deployment generated in-the-wild usage data which we analyze. Users of the system indicated that they would be enthusiastic to continue having access to the Paper Forager system in the future.