Raining Words - Other (TAPoR)
'Raining Words' is a tool designed to display word frequency information, minus the words in a chosen stop list, from a user-specified document in a Java applet. High frequency words appear larger and move more slowly than lower frequency words. This tool requires Java 1.4.2_08 or a more recent version for your browser. As the TAPoRware interface defaults to opening the applet in a new window, popups must also be enabled from the TAPoRware site in order to see the results.
This tool’s functionality has been incorporated into Voyant available online at www.voyant-tools.org.
Documentation
Creator(s): Geoffrey Rockwell et. al.
Creator's Site: http://geoffreyrockwell.com/
Creator's Email: grockwel@ualberta.ca
Repository:
Attributes
- Type of analysis: Visualization Analysis
- Type of license: Free
- Web Usable: Run in Browser
- Ease of Use: Easy
- Warning: No longer supported
- Tool Family: TAPoRware
- Historic Tool (developed before 2005): Discontinued (no longer available)
- TaDiRAH Goals: Analysis
- TaDiRAH Methods: Visualization
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Raining Words (Other) is a free, easy to use web-based tool designed to run in a browser window. It generates a list of high-frequency words from an HTML document at a user-specified web address, and visualizes them in a Java applet that sizes and assigns a movement speed to words based on that frequency.
To display the applet, users must have Java 1.4.2_8 or later installed for their browser. In order to have the applet display in a separate tab or browser window, users must also tell their browser’s pop-up blocker to permit popups from the TAPoR website. The tool can handle novel-length texts, though the tool’s processing will slow proportional to the size of the text.
There are a few options available for this tool. Users may limit subtext to only that text appearing within specific HTML elements, and either include all words, or limit based on a user-specified list, Glasgow stop list, or a user-specified pattern. Searching a pattern rather than a word requires skill with regular expressions and is thus not accessible to all users. Once the applet has loaded, the user may manipulate the speed and direction of the text by gesturing with their mouse cursor.
This tool has only a few minor problems. The Java applet is sensitive to the volume of other traffic on the user’s network and its processing may be slowed or it may fail to load when traffic is heavy. If it fails to load, refreshing the page or resubmitting the tool will generally resolve the issue. In addition, this tool’s input is limited to documents hosted at a web address, and it cannot process XML or plain text.
Despite these limitations, Raining Words (Other) is an interesting, interactive alternative to a word cloud for visualizing high frequency words in an HTML document.