WordWanderer Take your text for a walk
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.
Publications Associated Publications
WordWanderer: A Navigational Approach to Text Visualisation
Text visualisations provide visual representations of documents or small corpora with the primary aim of supporting language analysis. We are interested in developing a more playful approach to language that can be characterised by the notion of wandering as an open-ended movement. To support such a casual form of engagement with text, we designed the WordWanderer system: a visualisation technique that extends tag clouds into a navigational interface for text. The tool supports the gradual movement between word ‘context views’, which represent the words that co-occur in the vicinity of the selected word, and word-‘comparison views’, which arrange words based on their association strengths between two selected words. We report on the encouraging feedback from a ten-day deployment of the interface and present promising directions for future design and research.
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