The Curious Reader
Twenty-four year old Sara Adams is an avid reader and likes to stay up-to-date on the political climate. If Sara is not reading, she spends her free time looking up things she doesn't know and looks for solutions to her questions. Sara likes to feel well-informed and knowledgeable about politics. She doesn’t write or work with text processing algorithms, but has heard that they are used by researchers to quantitatively analyze certain properties of different texts. When she reads news articles, she likes to read news sources from across the political spectrum to be conscious of how different news outlets are covering the same story.
Goals: Sara wants to see if the ways of addressing certain topics in particular texts significantly differ based on the author’s word and topic choices. Even though she does not really know the underlying mechanisms that drive the algorithms, she would use the browser extension to compare coverage from various sources or to understand the writing styles of some of her favorite novelists. She hopes to do this out of curiosity, but she wouldn’t necessarily pursue these analyses any further.