Quick fix for word clouds: area not length
Jan 19, 2011
Here is one of my several suggestions for word-cloud design: encode the data in the area enclosed by each word, not the length of each word.
Every word cloud out there contains a distortion because readers are sizing up the areas, not the lengths of words. The extent of the distortion is illustrated in this example:
The word "promise" is about 3.5 times the size of "McCain" but the ratio of frequency of occurrence is only 1.6 times.
This is a quick fix that Wordle and other word cloud software can implement right away. There are other more advanced issues I bring up in my presentation (see here).
I would like to know what you think of this word cloud, which paid attention to color codes and dimension of the words:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/02/geography/usa-surnames-interactive
Posted by: Martha Lee | Jan 22, 2011 at 04:46 PM
Interesting...love the idea of Word Clouds as art (not for content creation and/or web analysis)...nice to see that creativity is still alive and well and living in some harmony with the more typical left brain web. Thanks.
Posted by: William Taylor | Apr 22, 2011 at 03:07 PM