Lots of information, little to read.
Skimming is a technique that is used to read faster and therefore more in less time. Instead of reading every word in a sentence, you just get the general idea of its content.
Using this application you can do this for a whole book and search relations of words inside it. It generates a so called Phrase Net for you where can find links between characters, locations or any other kind of information. It's up to your imagination.
You provide a book, a phrase and a maximal number of words you want to see. The application then skimms the book based on your input.
An example would be
Book (War and Peace): http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2600/2600-0.txt
Phrase: * and *
Max number of words: 100
As a result you will see relations between the characters of War and Peace.
Book has to be an URL. You can link it to any page, but you get the best results if you use plain text books.
Phrase uses the * symbol as a symbol for any possible word. Your phrase should start and end with a *. Inbetween, you can write what you want. The application takes this phrase and searches it in the book. The start and end star become the words you can see in the graph. The text inbetween becomes the line inbetween the two words. The direction of the line indicates the order of the appearing words. If the book contains e.g. a sentence "I ate an apple and an orange." and you search for * and a * you will get as a result the word apple with a link to the word orange.
With the maximal number of words you can define how many words you want to see at most in your phrase net. Sometimes you see less words, basically because there where no links between the top most words. Which words are shown depends on your filtering selection. You can select those words that occur most often, those who were most often the first word or those who were most often the last word of a phrase.
If a phrase net is to overloaded and you have a hard time finding relations, you could either show less words or you can click on words that your are interested in. If you click on a word, it gets highlighted. So do all other words that are connected to the word and the links inbetween.
The size of a word shows how often it was found compared to other words. The darker a word is, the more often it is at the beginning of a phrase. The brighter it is, the more it is at the end of a phrase. The thickness of the link inbetween words encodes how often the relation between the words occurs.