Sunday, February 24, 2008

Text Clouds and Workshop Evaluations

2282511064_f99a269c6a.jpg

Often we are faced with evaluating comments, suggestions, and survey questions frequently taken from small groups. Other than just reading the comments and sifting through them mentally, is there any (easy) way to get a view of "what they all mean?"

Last week, Kevin Lim mashed up web 2.0 style tagging with a small survey and came up with a text cloud visualization of "Workshop Participants Expectations: Facebook Strategies for the Classroom" for a workshop he led at the University of Buffalo [1], [2], [3]. Despited the non-linear, non-narrative presentation, one gets the sense that a theme is evolving.

A google search quickly came up with a series of "cut and paste" tools for creating these text clouds as well as a short article suggesting other explorations -- including turning one's Ph.D. thesis into a text cloud.

Tags: Text Analysis Visualization

[1] Kevin Lim, February 21, 2008. Workshop Participants Expectations: Facebook Strategies for the Classroom, http://www.flickr.com/photos/inju/2282511064/

[2] Kevin Lim, February 22, 2008. Facebook Strategies for the Classroom, http://www.flickr.com/photos/inju/sets/72157603961197338/

[3] Kevin Lim, February 20, 2008. Facebook Strategies for the Classroom, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=28579140444

[2] http://tagcrowd.com/

[3] http://tocloud.com/

[4] Joe Lamantia, Text Clouds: A New Form of Tag Cloud?, March 15, 2007. http://www.joelamantia.com/blog/archives/tag_clouds/text_clouds_a_new_form_of_tag_cloud.html