Saturday, 2 April 2016

"Spotlights" - Skimming Software - Summary

When doing online research, how hard is it having to read all these articles? I know, very difficult. This can in turn result in eye strains, fatigue and tiredness etc. Most persons do not even read every detail rather they tend to skim through these online texts. Because of this, researchers at Finland's Aalto University created a program that lets people skim even faster, while retaining more information.

According to the online article "New software will let you skim this article even quicker" (Ben Coxworth, March 29, 2016), this spotlight software automatically detects "visually important" contents such as headlines, tables and/or images on the pages that are scrolling by. Then, this content will briefly be superimposed over top of the scrolling text, drawing the users' attention to it. With this, it is possible to get a sense of what is being said without scrolling slowly to pick out important stuff manually.

"Browsing of long texts speeds up by 60 percent and less than half as much time is spent locating the desired locations in the text" says researcher Byungjoo Lee. "In addition, the probability of noticing points of interest in the text is increased by 210 percent compared to normal scrolling technique."

"Spotlights" is still in prototype form. However, it is hoped that it will soon be integrated into applications such as browsers and PDF viewers.


Reference:

http://www.gizmag.com/spotlights-skimming-software/42537/
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4 comments:

  1. Unknown2 April 2016 at 12:49

    As tempting as this kind of software will be, is it going to actually help us understand something completely. Let's say i'm reading up on mammals it might give me just give me like are any members of a clade of endothermic amniotes distinguished from reptiles and birds by the possession of a neocortex, hair, three middle ear bones, and mammary glands but how will it help me understand what all these things mean if you understand what i'm saying

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    1. Unknown2 April 2016 at 13:45

      I fully understand your concerns, but based on my understanding of the software, I think it will not help one to understand per se, but to locate the main and important parts/headings of articles. For example, you are researching mammals, all the important things about mammals must have a heading, so what the software would do is, while you're skimming through, it's going to locate these important headings, tables, images etc so that you can further look into them and read them yourself. Main purpose of it is to locate information at a faster pace.

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  2. Unknown2 April 2016 at 19:28

    Interesting blog Karina

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