CrossLit: Connecting Visual and Textual Sensemaking for Literature Review

Conducting literature reviews is cognitively demanding, requiring researchers to navigate large volumes of work while constructing coherent narratives that position their contributions. The process unfolds through iterative stages of sensemaking, each demanding different support. Existing tools emphasize either visual interfaces that provide macroscopic overviews or textual interfaces that support thematic organization and narrative construction. However, keeping modalities separate forces researchers to switch between tools, disrupting workflow continuity. We present CrossLit, a system that integrates and synchronizes visual and textual interfaces to support the entire process from discovering papers to composing coherent narratives. CrossLit allows researchers to group and annotate papers visually while generating aligned textual structures, and to edit text that automatically updates visual representations. We find that CrossLit helps users develop and refine conceptual structures and build narratives iteratively through seamless cross-modal transitions. We conclude by discussing design implications for synchronizing visual and textual interfaces for sensemaking support.