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1 Introduction
Many previous examples of text visualization have generally focused on a book’s contents and on plot analysis, but these approaches hardly provide practical clues needed for a reader to pick the right book for them, out of the thousands of recommendations on an Internet book store’s Web site. Common readers’ questions are not academic but practical: How much time will I need to read this book? Is it easy enough for a third-grade kid? This paper suggests that intuitive text visualization reflecting readability to support reader book selection.
2 Readability Visualization
2.1 Readability
A book’s readability is one of the important considerations in book selection. Readability is the ease in which text can be read and understood, and it directly affects the difficulty of a book. The factors of readability measurement have been studied by various researchers [Bormuth 1975] [Dale and Chall 1948] [Flesch 1948] [Gray and Leary 1935] [Gunning 1952] [Lively and Pressey 1923]. According to the previous studies, the length of a sentence, number of sentences per paragraph, and amount of characters per word; these factors are closely related to the physical print space and the eye movements readability issue of “return sweep to next line”.
2.1 Readability visualization with length factors
Figure 2: A sample readability visualization for 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' by Lewis Carroll. To explain the algorithm, we accelerated the brightness transition ten times.
We visually simulated a human reading process using the length
* jinpark@cau.ac.kr
related readability factors (Figure 1). The longer word, sentence, and paragraph are less readable. Each character was converted to a visible point of which the brightness decreases gradually during reading process (Figure 2). If a character is punctuation, the brightness of the point slightly increases. As a result, a book with longer words/ sentences/ paragraphs presents a dark and static image, but a book with concise words/ sentences/ paragraphs shows bright and dynamic patterns.
3 Conclusion
This alternative method of book selection has the strength of conventional data visualization that finds patterns instantly over huge data with human perception. We tested our visualization and the results prove the effectiveness of the suggested algorithm. Most of the testers (n=10) predicted readability correctly (r=0.8, p<0.01), so we believe this research will help readers to choose a right book.
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government MEST, Basic Research Promotion Fund (NRF-2010-013-H00001).
References
BORMUTH, J. 1975. The Cloze Procedure: Literacy in the Classroom. In W. D. Page (Ed.), Help for the reading teacher: New directions in research. Urbana, Ill: ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication.
DALE, E., CHALL, J. S. 1948. A Formula for Predicting Readability. In Educational Research Bulletin, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 37-54.
FLESCH, R. 1948. A New Readability Yardstick. In Journal of Applied psychology, Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 221-233.
GRAY, W. S., LEARY, B. E. 1935. What Makes a Book Readable. The University of Chicago press.
GUNNING, R. 1952. The Technique of Clear Writing. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill International Book Co.
LIVELY, B. A., PRESSEY, S. L. 1923. A Method for Measuring the ‘Vocabulary Burden’ of Textbooks. In Educational Administration and Supervision, Vol. 9, pp. 389-398. |
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发表于 2011-12-28 09:18:24
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发表于 2012-6-4 09:29:05