We present a study that explores how literary scholars interact with physical and digital documents in their daily work. Motivated by findings from this study, we propose refactoring the working environment of our target audience to improve the integration of digital material into established paper-centric processes. This is largely facilitated through the use of hybrid documents, i.e., cross-modal compound documents that employ a printed book for rich, tangible interaction in tandem with a digital component for matching interactive augmentation on a digital workbench. The results from two user studies in which we evaluated increasingly detailed prototypes demonstrate that this design offers better support for central workflows in literary studies than currently prevalent approaches.

Private areas are important in multi-user tabletop systems, but hard to implement with current technology. Existing approaches usually involve wearable devices such as shutter glasses or headmounted displays that are cumbersome to wear. We present TaPS, lightweight transparent widgets that only pass light coming from a particular direction to shield the content beneath them from other users, creating Tangible Private Spaces. TaPS widgets use low-cost hardware to provide tangible privacy controls to interactive tabletops. Informal studies indicate that TaPS widgets enable users to successfully move documents between public and private tabletop spaces without compromising privacy.