Talk:Lesson09

Creating Word Cloud Using Tableau

Besides Wordle and Many Eyes, it is also possible to create a basic word cloud using Tableau even though word cloud option is not available under the "Show me" tab. This can be done by changing the marks properties in the marks card. For example, if I want to know which occupation has the highest number of injuries, I will drag “Occupation” field to the “Text” card and specify the type of mark to show as “Text”.

Next, I will drag the same occupation column to the “Size” card. Right click on “Occupation” that is on the Size card and change to count instead of dimension.

I can also add some colours to the word cloud by dragging the Occupation column to Colour.

From the above example, I have realised that Tableau has so much more to offer and users are not restricted to the graph templates that are available under the “Show me” tab. By changing various properties in the Marks card, other visualisations such as word cloud and polygon maps can be created.

Sources:
http://kb.tableau.com/articles/howto/creating-a-word-cloud
http://kb.tableau.com/articles/knowledgebase/polygon-shaded-maps?

-Lim Hui Ting

Sunburst Diagram for Text Visualizations

In this lesson, I learnt that there are many ways to visualize text besides simply using tag clouds. While tag clouds help us easily visualize words based on their frequencies, they do not visualize the relationships these words may have with one another.

Besides the other visuals shared by Prof in class, I found another interesting visualization in the article: Information Visualization for Text Analysis, Marti Hearst, Search User Interfaces, Chapter 11 [1].

Similar to a sunburst diagram, visuals like the DocuBurst not only show us the weights (frequencies) of different words, they also display the hierarchical links between different words. Words linked to the text in the centre of the diagram appear as wedges in concentric circles. Size of the wedges reflect the frequency of which the word appears.

-Heng Yi Teng Mabel