This paper discusses our work conducting reader studies with prototypical reading interfaces designed in the context of funded Digital Humanities (DH) research projects. We discuss our conceptual and methodological approaches and contemplate which methods have been most productive in advancing our understandings of reading practices and interfaces. To situate this discussion, we first contemplate ways in which reading and new reading interfaces have been conceptualized by audiences within and beyond academia through the period of the emergence of digital environments for reading, and consider the merits of nuanced approaches that acknowledge the diversity of readers and reading practices.

Academic prototyping, like ethnography or bench studies, is a way of producing new knowledge about an idea. It is a phase in a critical process. In fact, it is perhaps better to speak of academic prototyping, rather than of academic prototypes. In this paper, as an example, we discuss the Dynamic Table of Contexts, an academic prototyping project that has served for many years as a focus of ideas about what it means to remediate and improve on a venerable print tradition.

In this article, we provide a discussion of the concept of visual interactive work-flows, how they relate to our previous work on structured surfaces, and how they have been adapted to experiments in managing articles for journal publication and managing biographical histories being written and tagged in XML. We conclude with a user experience study of the prototypes, which suggests that they are relatively acceptable at the level of reflective response, but might benefit from more iteration in their use of process and element metaphors.