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University of Konstanz

The coveted VAST 2010 Best Paper was awarded to a team of authors from the University of Konstanz in Germany. Daniela Oelke, David Spretke, Andreas Stoffel and Daniel Keim were honored for their piece entitled, “Visual Readability Analysis: How to Make Your Writings Easier to Read.” The tool presented in this paper – VisRA (Visual Readability Analysis) – is specifically designed to assist a writer in revising a draft document by identifying sentences and paragraphs that are difficult to read and understanding what makes them complicated.

VisRA visualization of the readability of a paper by using different colors to depict the scores of various pieces of the document in terms of word length, vocabulary complexity, nominal forms, sentence length, and sentence structure complecity.

With VisRA, the user may analyze the document using three different views: the Corpus View, Block View, and Detail View. The VisRA views range from overall visualization of the document scores to detailed visualization of sections or phrases within the document. Documents can be analyzed by five feature sets: word length, vocabulary complexity, nominal forms, sentence length, and sentence structure complexity.

In the paper, the authors presented three case studies that demonstrate the broad applicability of the VisRA tool. The authors used the tool on their own paper, a book on data visualization, and for analyzing a corpus with election data. The impact of this tool is extensive, helping writings craft better documents leading to increased readability.

For this paper and more from the University of Konstanz, visit: http://www.informatik.uni-konstanz.de/arbeitsgruppen/infovis/publikation....