RadCloud: Visualizing Multiple Texts with Merged Word Clouds

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Annotated RadCloud generated from 100 words per category for six different groups of metals derived from Wikipedia articles

Word clouds are a popular means for summarizing text documents. They usually visualize the word frequencies from single text sources, sometimes along with other attributes. However, the visualization of several text documents in one word cloud has rarely been addressed so far. This paper presents RadCloud, a technique for text visualization based on multiple word clouds merged into a single view. Inspired by the RadViz approach, the words are radially arranged in an overlap-free layout. The text sources are indicated by the spatial word arrangement and stacked bar charts. The approach has been implemented in an interactive text visualization tool and its usefulness is illustrated by an example.