Online Study of Word-Sized Visualizations in Social Media

Abstract

We report on an online study that compares three different representations to show topic diversity in social media threads: a word-sized visualization, a background color, and a text representation. Our results do not provide significant evidence that people gain knowledge about topic diversity with word-sized visualizations faster than with the other two conditions. Further, participants who were shown word-sized visualizations performed tasks with equally few or only slightly fewer errors.