In the age of “fake news” and alternative facts, critical thinking and information fluency is more important than ever. Academic papers are one tenuous connection to methodical, provable claims. While science journalists gamely translate academic research for the lay audience, how often does the lay person click through to critically read the academic studies themselves?

Academic research is difficult to access and even tougher to read. While scholarship evolves, the articles look near-identical to journals of 350 years ago -— same old publications, now in PDF format. Academy senior, Amanda Curtis, is re-imagining academic research for the 21st century by building interactive visualization tools to show, when presented the right way, academic research is anything but dull. 

For her senior capstone project, Curtis is building a comprehensive guide to teach people how to build their own interactive academic papers and how to present various kinds of data interactively. Curtis conducted a study to test her hypothesis about interactivity which invites the reader to actively engage with content rather than merely consuming. This is similar to how note-taking during lectures can help students retain information better than passive listening. Moreover, existing literature suggests that interactive learning increases the positive feeling students have toward the content.

Curtis tested nearly a hundred students on how quickly and effectively they could absorb information from a research paper, as well as their attitudes about what and how they learned. She also assessed different types of interaction: would participants learn more by clicking through papers rather than mousing over them to learn the details?

Curtis discovered that people who used interactive tools learned and retained just as much as their traditional counterparts, but faster. Moreover, those who read the papers interactively were more positive about academic scholarship and interested in reading more interactive papers. Even at the preliminary stage, Curtis has strong signals that there’s a demand for interactive scholarship. Once her how-to guide for building interactive academic papers is complete, Curtis plans to create an online platform where researchers can access and build their own interactive papers without any coding experience. 

In the world of academia, it's clear there is tremendous opportunity for innovation. Curtis’ work underscores that academic papers can and should evolve for a digital audience.

Re-Imagining Academic Research