Time-Varying Word Clouds

Anonymous

Keywords: word cloud, time-varying, real time, dynamic

TL;DR: Unique information visualization tool capable of demonstrating keywords and their trends over time from a set of time-related documents.

Abstract:

We visualize time-varying text information with physically based simulation. Word-clouds are a popular means of visualizing the frequency of different concepts in a text document, but there is little work using text that has a time component, for instance, news feeds, twitter, or abstracts of papers published in a given journal or conference by year. We use physically
simulated words that grow and shrink with time as an interactive web based visualization tool. We choose to use an existing 2D simulation framework Matter.js to develop the interface, with carefully designed forces to ensure a robust animation. We perform an informal user study to understand the ability of users to understand information presented in this dynamic way.