Word Clouds in the Wild

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.