Weighted Centroid - Other (TAPoRware)
The Weighted Centroid is a java applet designed to display a circular graph based on word distribution data. The text is divided up into an arbitrary number of units, which are positioned around the circumference of the circle in a clockwise sequence. The more times a word appears in a particular text unit, the closer the word will be to that unit in the circle, and the more units it appears in, the closer it will appera to the centre.
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
List this tool appear on
Rating
Suggested Tools
Comments
Weighted Centroid (Other) is a free, easy to use web-based tool designed to run in a browser window. It generates a circular visualization of high frequency words from an HTML, XML or plain text document at a user-specified web address or from a local file, and visualizes them in a Java applet that places them in a circle relative to their frequency and distribution within the source document.
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 break the text into paragraphs, according to its percentage of the larger text or into chunks of a specific number of words. They may also limit words to those not on the Glasgow stop list, choose how many of the top words to include in the visualization, and specify words in addition to those top words to include.
Once the applet has loaded, users can click on or hover the mouse cursor over words to see their associations. HTML table and tab delimited text output is also available for users seeking an alternate means of representing the data.
This tool has a few 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. When the tool generates its list of top words, punctuation is often identified as a word and quotation marks appended to adjacent words. When the tab delimited output is selected, the tool may not process some characters correctly; please see List Words (Plain Text) for examples.
Despite these limitations, Weighted Centroid (Other) is a rich, interactive means of visualizing word relationships and distributions.