Authors:
M. P. Maurits
1
;
M. P. Boers
2
and
R. Knevel
1
Affiliations:
1
Leiden University Medical Center, Rheumatology Department, Leiden, The Netherlands
;
2
Amsterdam University Medical Center, Department of Epidemiology and Data Science, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Keyword(s):
Word Clouds, Scaling, Survey, Surface Area, Font Size.
Abstract:
Word clouds are a popular tool for text summary visualisation. By scaling words based on relative frequency, readers should be capable of quickly deducing some of the text semantics. We raise the question whether word clouds truly aid visualisation or rather mislead readers by scaling the wrong text aspect. We evaluated the magnitude of misinterpretation of word clouds using both a traditional font-scaling approach and a novel surface-area-scaling approach. Using an online survey we involved 234 participants, whom we tasked with guesstimating the frequency of 2 words either side of a word with a fixed frequency. We defined an error margin based on the regression slope of the guesstimations with the true frequencies. Clouds were constructed using the font-size or the word-area scaling method, a doubling or a linearly increasing frequency scheme and either words with a constant or increasing length. Errors were compared between settings using Wilcoxon tests. Both word size scaling meth
ods resulted in poor performance of the participants and highlighted great inter-participant variation. Guesstimation accuracy was clearly dependent on the objective complexity of the visualisation. Our survey supports the hypothesis that word clouds are a fickle measure to convey word frequencies in a corpus of text.
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