An Approximate Solution for TL;DR [~50 Year Old Text Summarization Hack Presented as a ~1.7MB Animated GIF]

Suffering from information overload? Too much TL;DR happening in your life? Attention span just isn’t what it used to be?

Watch this short ~30 second screencast (a ~1.7MB animated GIF) that demonstrates a 50+ year old hack for summarizing news articles and other types of online content. After all, it seemed fitting that the presentation of a text summarization algorithm would be as compressed and summarized as possible, right?

The text summarization code itself is taken from Mining the Social Web.

Click on the image above to watch a higher resolution version of this ~30 second animated GIF screencast. This preview version is ~360KB while the higher resolution version is still only 1.7MB. (WordPress wouldn’t render the full version of the GIF containing the animation inline because of the constraints imposed by this site’s theme.)

For those who prefer it, the video version of this “screencast” is also available.