Inverted Word Clouds

When word cloud centres build word clouds based on people’s answers to a question, majority answers are emphasized while minority answers fade to the background. In order to make minority voices heard, the development team is building a word cloud tool that allows users to have the option to flip the algorithm to highlight either the majority or minority answers.

Currently, this word cloud tool includes two steps. Further development will be based on feedback.

1. People submit their answers to a question. For example: What are the three most important problems to be addressed by inclusive design?

2. The word cloud is built dynamically by polling submitted answers every five seconds. By default, the less frequent words will be highlighted. When the “conventional weighting” box is checked, the more frequent words will be highlighted.

Visit these wiki pages to learn more about the technical details:

1. Inverted Word Cloud Architecture
2. Evaluation of Word Cloud Libraries
3. The Source Code in GitHub