Preview a Reading with VocabGrabber

VocabGrabber, a tool from Thinkmap’s Visual Thesaurus, allows users to paste in up to 100 pages of text, and then see a visual display of the most frequent and most relevant vocabulary. If you have a transcript of something you want to listen to, you can also grab the spoken vocabulary in the same manner, as a pre-listening strategy. 

My favorite element of VocabGrabber is the five-level “Relevance” bars, which allow you to narrow down the cloud of vocabulary to just the words with the highest probability of being core to the topic of the text, by activating only levels 4 and 5.

You can also see every example of each word extracted by VocabGrabber from the text you pasted in, and a VisualThesaurus synonym cloud for each word.

Using VocabGrabber to preview these highly relevant words can make reading a text or listening to an audio recording much more accessible.

The following image shows results from pasting in a 2016 article on gene editing by Tabebordbar et al. at doi: 10.1126/science.aad5177.