CHIFOO Meeting: Reading and Collaborating in a Digital Age July 8, 2009

Presented by Cathy Marshall, Microsoft Research

Reading is an inherently social experience: what we read and how we read it is shaped by who we know and the broader communities we belong to. With that in mind, Cathy will take a fresh look at the future of eBooks and how we get there from here. In particular, she will share some findings from a body of studies of reading-related activities (such as annotation and clipping) and will draw on her experiences with several generations of eBook products, including Microsoft Reader, ePeriodicals (a reader for magazines like The New Yorker and Esquire), and the Times News Reader (an RSS-based reader for The New York Times).

About the Speaker

Cathy Marshall is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley; she has knocked around in both the product and research divisions at Microsoft. Cathy has long worked in the disciplinary interstices of computer science, information science, and the humanities, with occasional collaborations in the arts and the sciences. She was a long-time member of the research staff at Xerox PARC and is an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries at Texas A&M University. Cathy won the ACM Hypertext conference’s best paper award in 1998 and 1999, and the best paper award at the IEEE/ACM Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in 1998 and 2008. She has delivered keynotes at WWW, Hypertext, Usenix FAST, CNI, VALA, ACH-ALLC, and a variety of other CS and LIS venues. Go to Cathy’s Homepage to find her publications, her blog, her contact information, and—most importantly—how she is related to Elvis.