Hello and welcome! Firstly, please make your browser full screen and refresh this page for a better readability experience. What you're seeing and reading right now is on an experimental web interface. This is a sample document that will get you familiar with the system. Once you get what's going on, you can click the above button and visualize your own text for skim reading.

If you look to your left, you will notice some colourful bars. Each bar visualizes and represents the line it is next to. Using an algorithm (that is NOT perfect), I've determined the potential information on each line and coloured the bar accordingly. This means the darker the colour of the bar, the more likely it is that there is important information on its respective line. Furthermore, click a sentence. Click this sentence. Yes, this sentence, the one you're reading right now, click it please. Okay you might have clicked one or two, but did you notice how the colours of the bar to the left faded? Yes! this is an interactive interface. Once you click a sentence, you let the algorithm know that you have read it. The algorithm then decreases the colour of all lines that give you similar information as the sentence you've clicked, indicating that those lines may not be very informative for you anymore. In this manner, the colours of the bars are changing to reflect where the most valuable and important information may be given what you already know.

Next, let's talk about the length of the bars. The lengths indicate the increasing or decreasing of information. This means if the bars are getting smaller on the next few lines, then it is likely the next few lines have less information than the current line you're on. Inversely, if the bars are getting longer, it is likely that there is more information coming along those lines! The lengths of the bars do not change interactively.

This paragraph is useless, I'm just typing nonsense here. It really isn't that critical to the rest of what I'm saying. In fact, I'm just writing randomly now. The philosopher Slavoj Zizek says,`` We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom''. That's a good quote. Did I tell you about Zizek's chicken joke? Never mind, we can save that for another day. Let's get back to it.

Look at the bars next to the above paragraph, do you notice how the colour is faded? That's an indicator that the above paragraph probably did not hold important information related to the main points of this document. In this way, the visualization, though it is not perfect, can act as a guide as you (skim) read a document.

This interface was designed as part of a research project measuring the effect of the left-hand side visualization on skim reading. Essentially, this interface is designed to be used to summarize the main gist of the document through skim reading. So, as you read, you can click the sentences that you feel mention the main points and you would put in a summary. Think of it as if you were reading and highlighting generally important information, except the visualization is there as quantitative aid. Other helpful features are the progress bars at the top of this page. The green bar indicates how far you are through the document. The yellow bar on top will fill up as you click sentences, indicating the length of your summary so far. A completely filled yellow bar means your summary is a quarter length of the entire document.

To launch a demo of this and keep it cheap, the algorithm and processing have been simplified compared to the initial design. There may also be small text formatting bugs at times due to the use of limited text processing techniques. In general, this visualization works best with non-creative texts (essays, articles, news, documents, etc.) written with the purpose of providing information to the reader. Try it out with your own text! You may find it reduces your reading times or helps you navigate to the important information, aiding the snap judgements you make as you skim read a text.