Word clouds are popular for visualizing documents, but are not as useful for comparing documents, because identical words are not presented consistently across different clouds. We introduce the concept of word storms, a visualization tool for analyzing corpora of documents. A word storm is a group of word clouds, in which each cloud represents a single document, juxtaposed to allow the viewer to compare and contrast the documents. We present a novel algorithm that creates a coordinated word storm, in which words that appear in multiple documents are placed in the same location, using the same color and orientation, across clouds. This ensures that similar documents are represented by similar-looking word clouds, making them easier to compare and contrast visually. We evaluate the algorithm using an automatic evaluation based on document classification, and a user study. The results confirm that a coordinated word storm allows for better visual comparison of documents.
展开▼
