Word Clouds in the Wild

TL;DR

This paper surveys the usage of word clouds in Digital Humanities and journalism, highlighting common visual encodings and the frequent use of word clouds for analytical tasks, suggesting further research into their legibility and interaction channels.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of how word clouds are used and encoded in specific domains, emphasizing the need for improved legibility and interaction studies.

Findings

Font size, color, and placement are primary encoding channels.

Word clouds are often used for analytical tasks in Digital Humanities.

Research into visual encoding interactions and legibility is needed.

Abstract

Word clouds are frequently used to analyze and communicate text data in many domains. In order to help guide research on improving the legibility of word clouds, we have conducted a survey of their usage in Digital Humanities academia and journalism. Using a modified grounded theory approach, we sought to identify the most common purposes for which word clouds were employed and the most common visual encodings they contained. Our findings indicate that font size, color, and word placement dominate as the primary data-encoding channels, as we hypothesized. Perhaps more surprisingly, we found that asking viewers to perform analytical tasks with word clouds was relatively common, especially in DH sources. This suggests that research into the interactions of these visual encoding channels (particularly in regards to legibility) is warranted.