We are experimenting with visual ways in which we can enhance people’s engagement with language. By fusing the information we can obtain from corpus searches, concordance outputs and word clouds we are aiming to enable and encourage people to notice and wander through the words they read, write and speak.
Text visualizations represent documents or small corpora with the main aim to support language analysis. The intent behind the WordWanderer is to develop a more playful approach to language that can be characterized by the notion of wandering as an open-ended movement. The system is designed to support such a casual form of engagement with text; introducing a visualization technique that extends tag clouds into a navigational interface. The visualization supports the gradual movement between word-context views, which represent the words co-occurring in the proximity of the selected word, and word-comparison views, which arrange words based on their association strengths between two selected words.