Comments on: Word clouds to support reflection http://blog.logicalrealism.org/2010/05/04/word-clouds-to-support-reflection/ Tue, 17 May 2011 01:02:09 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: sean http://blog.logicalrealism.org/2010/05/04/word-clouds-to-support-reflection/comment-page-1/#comment-33528 sean Mon, 14 Jun 2010 20:37:16 +0000 http://blog.logicalrealism.org/?p=258#comment-33528 Hi - thanks for the thoughts. (1) I think that filtering is worth exploring. Possibly at as coarse of a level as nouns and verbs, possibly trying to be more precise. (2) I like the context idea a lot. This might be done as a mouseover. Right now, people can click and it will filter their list to posts containing that word, but a click is more work. Some people also didn't realize they were clickable... so that's just poor UI on my part. Playing around with bigrams might also be a way to provide more context (particularly once people have a lot of posts) - "made" vs. "made _(what?)_" Hi – thanks for the thoughts.

(1) I think that filtering is worth exploring. Possibly at as coarse of a level as nouns and verbs, possibly trying to be more precise.

(2) I like the context idea a lot. This might be done as a mouseover. Right now, people can click and it will filter their list to posts containing that word, but a click is more work. Some people also didn’t realize they were clickable… so that’s just poor UI on my part. Playing around with bigrams might also be a way to provide more context (particularly once people have a lot of posts) – “made” vs. “made _(what?)_”

]]> By: scritic http://blog.logicalrealism.org/2010/05/04/word-clouds-to-support-reflection/comment-page-1/#comment-32894 scritic Wed, 05 May 2010 15:36:48 +0000 http://blog.logicalrealism.org/?p=258#comment-32894 This is a very interesting project! I especially like how therapeutic the project's goal is. A couple of suggestions+reasons for why the word clouds didn't work: (1) On the surface, it might just be that you need a better filtering mechanisms for the words. Along with what you've suggested above, what about just keeping the nouns and the verbs? (2) A second reason could be that extracting words out of what are essentially narratives -- to help your users find the similarities between them -- doesn't really work because the the words don't evoke the narratives themselves. What if you extract the most frequently occurring words out but surround them by their context (say the sentence in which they occur)? I am thinking this will function better as a way to make your users think back over their experiences. This is a very interesting project! I especially like how therapeutic the project’s goal is.

A couple of suggestions+reasons for why the word clouds didn’t work:

(1) On the surface, it might just be that you need a better filtering mechanisms for the words. Along with what you’ve suggested above, what about just keeping the nouns and the verbs?

(2) A second reason could be that extracting words out of what are essentially narratives — to help your users find the similarities between them — doesn’t really work because the the words don’t evoke the narratives themselves. What if you extract the most frequently occurring words out but surround them by their context (say the sentence in which they occur)? I am thinking this will function better as a way to make your users think back over their experiences.

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