Speeches by Obama versus speeches by Clinton. Blogs by men versus blogs by women. Song lyrics from the 80s versus lyrics from the 50s. The list of tag clouds on Many Eyes is a study in contrasts.
There’s no question that our users like visualizing the differences between related texts, but making comparisons by looking at one text a time is difficult. Today we’re launching a new version of our tag cloud, which we hope will allow for easier and clearer analyses.
If you want to compare two texts directly, you can merge them (see the instructions for details) and then see a special “interleaved” tag cloud, which will let you compare side by side the relative frequencies of the words in the two texts. You can see an example here:
which shows the US presidential State of the Union address from 2002 and 2003. The 2002 speech is in orange and the 2003 speech is in blue. You can see a number of differences directly: “Afghanistan” shrinks dramatically from 2002 to 2003, and “Saddam” seems to grow in proportion.
Give the new tag cloud a spin! We’re looking forward to seeing what comparisons our users draw next.
April 3rd, 2008 at 7:13 am
Where’s the link for the 02/03 State of the Union addresses?
April 3rd, 2008 at 7:16 am
You can view the State of the Union visualization here.
April 8th, 2008 at 1:30 am
[…] The latest visualization tool, released just last week, is called a comparison cloud. It is an expansion of the basic tag cloud concept. […]
April 10th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
[…] Even better, about a week ago Many Eyes came out with a tag cloud that compares 2 texts at the same time. The size of each word shows you the frequency, and the color (red or blue) tells you which of the texts it came from. Thus you can tell at a glance how often words come up in each body of text. […]
April 14th, 2008 at 11:40 am
This is a very interesting addition to word cloud charting. I like it.
Obviously the larger the volume of text being compared the greater the likelihood of getting words that occur in both. In smaller passages, where a lesser proportion of words occur in both, one suggestion might be to add a button at the top to be able to only display words that occur in both passages. You can obviously see those words in the middle of the current display, but this might be easily implemented and quite useful.
April 17th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
[…] Even better, as I also mentioned in part one, Many Eyes recently rolled out a tag cloud comparison visualization. Many Eyes basically takes two separate word clouds and, by using sizes to indicate frequency and color to indicate which text, compares them. Continuing with the theme of those other text visualization links (i.e. famous black people), I made my own comparison tag cloud. Being both a huge rap fan and a junkie for political news, I decided to compare the poetry of 2pac with Barack Obama’s recent high-profile speech on race relations. […]
April 21st, 2008 at 10:06 am
Hi
I just came across your site. I like the fact that you give people many options to explore the visualization of their data. What works for one may not work for another.
We work in another area of visual communication. We use photographs to spark significant conversations. What comes out of these processes is similar to what you describe on your About page. The images help people to tap into their stories, which is also about getting to the subconscious. It’s truly amazing to watch people connect in a deep way in very little time.
I think there were some people from IBM at the VizThink conference this past January. Was that you guys?
Good luck with your work.