In the last week I've completed reports for two separate clients that included word clouds as a way of showing the results of text responses from surveys. One client was delighted. One client said it was - in so many words - useless. The wordles might as well have looked like these:. So who is right? Are they beautifully insightful? Or are they mere fluff that provides little insight into data?
What are word clouds? Nearly all research we conduct includes some sort of open-ended text question where respondents are asked to type an answer to a question. Coding of open ended data has been, and continues to be, a very reliable way to understand themes quantitatively. However, it comes at a price. Word clouds present a low-cost alternative for analyzing text from online surveys, plus it's much faster than coding.
Essentially, word clouds generators work by breaking the text down into component words and counting how frequently they appear in the body of text. Next, the font point size is assigned to words in the cloud based on the frequency that the word appears in the text: the more frequently the word appears, the larger the word is shown in the cloud.
Instead of discussing the technicalities of how word clouds are created, here are some of my thoughts as to the pros and cons of using word clouds to represent your research data. Consider this example where "titillate" and "erroneous" both have nine letters and the same weight in the word cloud.
They appear to be very different sizes because of the shape of the glyphs. For something that has famously been called the mullet of the internet, and even harmful , it's important to understand what word clouds do and don't tell you. Certainly they are engaging, fun and offer some insight into textual data. Wordle : this tool is easy to use and creates word clouds in a variety of shapes and colours.
Tagxedo : this tool can be used to create word clouds direct from web pages, twitter feeds, search results and RSS feeds. Tagcrowd : TagCrowd allows you to create word clouds in three different ways: by pasting the text of a document into the tool; by adding the url of a webpage; or by uploading a file to the tool. Word Clouds could be Considered Harmful: careful consideration of the argument against word clouds. Phrase Net Connecting key words in a text using lines to show linkages.
Word Tree Displaying of the words in qualitative dataset, where frequently used words are connected by branches to the other words that appear nearby in the data. Feinberg, J. Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds. Retrieved August , from wordle. Tagxedo - Word Cloud with Styles. Login Login and comment as BetterEvaluation member or simply fill out the fields below.
Example Qualitative database from Sisters of the Road - made with Wordle Here is an example word cloud created using Wordle. Visualize data. A special thanks to this page's contributors. Stuart Henderson. To keep your word clouds clean and well structured, we apply certain rules and transformations to its display. All accents on letters are discarded except on Internet Explorer, due to a technical limitation ;.
An expression is preserved in its entirety if it consists of less than 30 characters. Otherwise, it is split at its spaces or punctuation, as mentioned above ;. If the option "likes on answers" is active, every "like" on an answer will display it as if it had been sent once more. This prevents words like "in" to be displayed by themselves.
Note that an expression like "tongue in cheek" will be displayed containing the "in" because it won't be split in two;. Aside from the transformations described above concerning capital letters and accents , two words written in a different way will be displayed individually in the word cloud. Therefore, words like "school" and "schools" will be displayed separately. Turn on the "Multiple answers": this will allow participants to send in as many answers as they'd like, which is generally useful for displaying the different concepts as a word cloud;.
0コメント