Re: Wordle worthwhile to accessify?

Forwarding a comment from Jonathon Feinberg on my blog (
http://blog.overscore.com/?p=14) to you:

"Elizabeth,

The word count would be best displayed as a list in decreasing order, not as
a Wordle. Such a list would not give the pleasure that a Wordle gives, nor
would people be creating lists of word frequency by the hundreds of
thousands. Youšre right that itšs a visualizationS which is why therešs no
sense in creating a non-visual representation of it.

If someone really wants such a service, it would take all of 30 minutes to
create in PHP!
"
- Jonathan Feinberg



> From: "Elizabeth J. Pyatt" <ejp10@psu.edu>
> Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:40:42 -0000
> To: Peter Thiessen <peter.thiessen@primalfusion.com>, <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
> Subject: Re: Wordle worthwhile to accessify?
>
> I think Jonathan of Wordle is missing the power of his own tool.
>
> It's NOT just placing random words in a picture, but extracting words
> from a text and presenting an informational visualization. It's
> telling the user which words are the most frequently used on a Web
> page or text (because bigger = more frequently used) as well as a
> list of key words.
>
> For instance, I did a Wordle on an educational technology site and
> discovered that the top word used was "students" and that
> "technology" was a 3rd tier word at best. I think that any user would
> be interested in this (in fact I myself wouldn't mind seeing a
> cleaned up text based version of this list).
>
> FYI - I just found an option which shows a pop-up list of the words
> in alphabetical order and the word count.  I think this IS the
> alternative information. I would recommend a simple non-Java link to
> this list (possibly even an option for sorting by frequency). I think
> all users would be interested and would benefit.
>
> I think the "eye candy" part (e.g. colors, fonts, layout) may be
> irrelevant, but definitely not the frequency list.
>
> Elizabeth
>
>
>> Great points, especially exposing semantics to search engines etc.
>>
>> I argued point 5 with Jonathan and this proved hard to convince him of. His
>> argument was: Wordle is not about trivial activities such as counting or
>> words but all about visually representing words - its all about the visual
>> eye candy. He then pointed me to a few text analysis tools:
>>
>> Perhaps these would be more along the lines you're thinking of?
>> http://textalyser.net/
>> http://www.textanalysis.com/
>> http://www.textanalysis.info/
>> http://www.usingenglish.com/resources/text-statistics.php
>>
>> One response might be that video on the net is all about the eye candy. The
>> audio is important but not nearly as important. People still find value in
>> adding captions that help describe the visual content. I caught myself on
>> this argument though, how the hell would you "caption" a Wordle and get
>> those funky text effects meaningfully described?
>>
>> -peter
>>
>
> --
> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
> Elizabeth J. Pyatt, Ph.D.
> Instructional Designer
> Education Technology Services, TLT/ITS
> Penn State University
> ejp10@psu.edu, (814) 865-0805 or (814) 865-2030 (Main Office)
>
> 210 Rider Building  (formerly Rider II)
> 227 W. Beaver Avenue
> State College, PA   16801-4819
> http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10/psu
> http://tlt.psu.edu
>

Received on Wednesday, 15 October 2008 20:25:44 UTC