Notice: ManiWordle made by folks at The Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna) is not affiliated with me.
Motivation
The tremendously huge popularity of Wordle (at www.wordle.net) attested the importance of aesthetics and expressiveness in attracting people to use visualizations. People can easily start creating their own visually striking Wordles and freely use their "creations," inviting themselves into a community of "creators," not just consumers of an art. As more and more people join the community, various learning activities are taking place throughout blogs and forums. Most of the Wordle tricks shared among users teach them how to manipulate the text fed into the Wordle to tweak the final layout in a desirable way. A famous Wordle trick is how to change the color of a specific word. Users have to export the wordle image in a file and manually edit it using graphics editing tools such as Inkscape or Photoshop. Lack of such simple fine-tuning of the resulting image in Wordle could leave users not fully satisfied after numerous trials of making randomly generated layout. This leaves us much room for improvement in the current Wordle in terms of better accommodating users' proficiency and creativity needs.
The main goal of ManiWordle (for manipulable Wordle) is to unravel some of the limitations in Wordle, while keeping the same set of functionalities. ManiWordle is built on top of the Wordle layout which is determined by the set of parameters that users can change; these parameters define restrictions or rules in generating a random layout. To support users' direct involvement in layout generation process, ManiWordle empowers them with direct manipulation of the layout result.
2010.10 "ManiWordle: Providing Flexible Control over Wordle"
by Kyle Koh, Bongshin Lee, Bohyoung Kim, Jinwook Seo
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 16, No. 6, pp. 1190-1197, Nov/Dec 2010.
Presented as Full Paper at InfoVis 2010, October 24-29 in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.
Download Full PDF - Supplemental Video(YouTube Link) - Research Page@HCIL - Research Page@Here
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2010.175
Program Binary
Requirements : Windows XP or above
Microsoft .net Framework 4 Client Profile : http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=24872
Microsoft XNA Framework Redistributable 4.0 Refresh : http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27598
Executable : ManiWordle2.0
Special Instructions for Korean users
워들은 단어의 빈도로 단어의 크기가 조절되는 워드 클라우드 시각화 기법의 하나입니다. 마니워들을 사용하시면 사용자가 가지고 있는 폰트를 이용해 한글로도 워드클라우드를 만드실 수 있습니다. 보통 한글을 이용한 워드 클라우드의 경우 단순 단어를 사용하지 않고 형태소 단위로 표현하는 방법이 일반적이지만 ManiWordle2.0에는 이 기능이 포함되어 있지 않습니다. 따라서 형태소 단위의 시각화를 사용하고 싶으신 분은 형태소 분석 프로그램을 통해 추출된 텍스트를 입력하셔야 정확한 시각화가 가능합니다. 추후에 한국 사용자들을 위해 공개된 형태소 분석기와 결합된 버젼도 고려해 보겠습니다.