It’s a simple and familiar data visualization device for interpreting and displaying text content – they’re sometimes called ‘word clouds’ or ‘tag clouds’ — such that words appearing more often in the text are reproduced with proportionally larger type and words occurring less frequently with smaller type. Typically, an algorithm will sort the words in a block of text by frequency of occurrence (n), remove common and irrelevant words such as “the” or “as”, assign type sizes based on n, and generate a pleasing typographical design from the words. Different algorithms yield different results, as do user choices such as typeface, rotation, colour schemes, etc.
The term itself derives from a popular website – now defunct – that allowed users to enter their own text and download resulting wordles. While the original site is gone, many similar sites have appeared, offering different features and appealing to different audiences. Links to a few can be found below.
Wordles can function as a “quick and dirty” way to analyze “big data”, provided that data is in the form of words! Very long blocks of text can be quickly analyzed for recurring themes or terminology, and the resulting graphic provides a quick and intuitive visual “snapshot” of the text.
Certainly, it must be noted that wordles are no substitute for qualitative coding or similar strategies for extracting quantitative results from masses of text data – results are still qualitative, and are likely to be interpreted quickly and visually rather than formally and rigorously. In this respect, wordles function almost like a typographical version of a histogram (in which the height or size of various bars representing categories is proportional to the frequency of occurrence of that category in the data) and with a similar intent: to permit a quick and informal evaluation of data too large to “see” all at once.
In the educational context, wordles can be used:
- To extract and display themes or recurring terms in a text for discussion or debate
- To quickly isolate trends in qualitative data such as a satisfaction survey or social research responses
- To check essays or other writing for overuse of jargon or other terms
- To compare students’ attitudes, ideas or understanding of a topic, pre- and post-lesson
- To create visually appealing, relevant graphics to accompany papers, handouts, websites, etc. (the featured image for this post is a wordle of the ETEC523 syllabus)
- To encourage and facilitate vocabulary acquisition for primary students or language students
- To serve as a focus for discussion of the themes, settings or characters in a work of literature
Viegas, Wattenburg and Feinburg (2009) studied wordles, their uses, and users’ understanding of and attitude toward them in education and found wordles, in the hands of learners, fostered a form of participatory culture:
It is typical to use visualization to illustrate and communicate. However, instead of simply presenting pre-made wordles to students, teachers often crafted exercises that involved the students making wordles themselves. In other words, the process of creation was a critical part of many of these classroom activities. The fact that students could take an active role clearly appealed to bother teachers and students, and made Wordle into an effective learning tool.
Care must be taken when interpreting the output of a wordle generator, with particular attention paid to the assumptions required – namely, that the frequency of the appearance of a word in a text is meaningfully proportional to its importance in some way, and that words have only one meaning. Rather than telling us “what’s important”, wordles programmatically highlight words or terms that might (or might not) be important, and any real meaning can only be produced from our further consideration of them.
In the accompanying video, I’ll show you how easy it is to generate and customize wordles for your own teaching purposes. Below is also a link to the online tool I used, as well as a few others. I strongly urge you to give it a quick try using text of interest to yourself, and to consider ways by which wordles might help you present ideas, frame discussion or stimulate debate in the classroom.
Word Cloud Generator – I like the simple user interface and ability to manipulate the algorithm easily — this is the one that I demonstrate in the video below
ABCYA Word Clouds — great choice for kids!
Mentimeter — presentation software that creates wordles from participants in real time. Cool!
MonkeyLearn Word Cloud Generator — easily change colour, use themes, get word counts, and more
Wordclouds.com — options galore! Mask output to shapes, control colours, quick saving and sharing options and much more
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Viegas, F. B., Wattenberg, M., & Feinberg, J. (2009). Participatory visualization with wordle. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 15(6), 1137-1144. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2009.171
Persistent full-text link: https://tinyurl.com/y73pryba