A way for phrases to be kept together in the word cloud format
I would like to see a way for phrases (ie: peanut butter and jelly) to be kept together in a word cloud. In Wordle.net, for example, using the ~ does this. Perhaps using quotation marks or some other characters could accomplish this. That way, "apple butter" and "peanut butter" do not make the word 'butter' alone any larger.
Felix Jacomino
shared this idea
This is now available! Your students may use either an underscore _ or a tilde ~ to combine words for a wordcloud. You can read more about it here:
https://blog.polleverywhere.com/word-cloud-color-combine-words/Thanks for the feedback!
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Butch
commented
For word clouds involving sentences, can we use also factor in line breaks too to break up the sentence in two lines? What is the character to use in this case?
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Anonymous
commented
Thank you for your question and answer. This being a solution to this problem. https://towardsdatascience.com/can-we-please-stop-using-word-clouds-eca2bbda7b9d
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Jeff
commented
For my audiences, I'd prefer to instruct them to "Enter your response in 3 or fewer words" rather than explaining the need to add a character between words. Nonetheless, I confirm that adding a dash works. Adding a dash keeps the two words together, but it is inconsistently used by participants. Further, as I understand, considering the example "My favorite painting is the Mona Lisa", that phrase would be presented in small text as multiple responses are provided. I.E. minimal impact.
Please keep together and present the participants' response in a single string.
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The + sign could be interesting to look into! Thanks for the suggestion
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Mike York
commented
I think the ~ is a reasonable solution. One character instead of two (" ") and it is not a character we would use for anything else, that I can think of, anyway... If the ~ doesn't work consider other special characters like * or perhaps +. The + would be intuitive. This word + that word... peanut+butter...
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Well, it is pretty common for people to respond to word clouds in a sentence type format. For example, if you have a Word Cloud poll question like "What is your favorite painting?"
An audience member might reply: "My favorite painting is the Mona Lisa."
If we use spaces then this would be a very long and unique response/phrase in the word cloud. So, instead we treat each word separately right now. This way if a lot of people respond with some form of Mona Lisa it will be large and well represented.
Ideally, we'd have some way to tie Mona and Lisa together so they are one phrase in the cloud. This could be done by informing the audience to reply Mona~Lisa, Mona-Lisa, or Mona.Lisa and we could then render it appropriately.
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Ryan
commented
Now, if a character IS necessary... tilde is ok... but many people don't know that word and it's not obvious if shown what it is at a distance, and is likely buried on a phone on the symbol keyboard. It would be good if it's something available on the main screen of most cell-phone keyboards.
@ or period. But if they are sending sentences, the period will show up. So, throwing @ out there.
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Ryan
commented
Why can't the user enter the phrase with spaces and the spaces get converted to the tilde (if that's even necessary)? Is it assumed that multiple words being entered are intended to be separate entries separated by a space?
I think it would make more sense for people to enter a word or phrase with spaces, and if you had more than one answer being submitted as a list, to put commas between the separate items. Every time I've used Word Clouds as a participant or presenter, single words, or phrases are what were being submitted, not lists of words separated by a space.
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daleg
commented
support multi-word phrases in open response polls