Participatory Visualization with Wordle Fernanda B. Vi��gas, Martin Wattenberg, and Jonathan Feinberg Abstract���We discuss the design and usage of ���Wordle,��� a web-based tool for visualizing text. Wordle creates tag-cloud-like displays that give careful attention to typography, color, and composition. We describe the algorithms used to balance various aesthetic criteria and create the distinctive Wordle layouts. We then present the results of a study of Wordle usage, based both on spontaneous behaviour observed in the wild, and on a large-scale survey of Wordle users. The results suggest that Wordles have become a kind of medium of expression, and that a ���participatory culture��� has arisen around them. Index Terms���Visualization, text, tag cloud, participatory culture, memory, educational visualization, social data analysis. 1 INTRODUCTION It is the dream of anyone who aspires to create visualizations for a mass audience: watch as your work is viewed millions of times on the Internet, see it on the nation���s biggest newspapers, have it used by scientists, kids, and politicians. Jonathan Feinberg had precisely this experience when he created the Wordle web site (http://www.wordle.net/), a tool for making ���word clouds���. In the nine months since its launch in June 2008, over 600,000 such word clouds (or ���wordles���) have been created���a pace of one new wordle every 10 seconds. How and why did the Wordle site capture the imagination of so many people? And what can it tell us about the place that data visualization might take in mass culture? Wordles are close relatives of tag clouds, encoding word frequency information via font size. Despite the shared DNA, wordles look remarkably different from regular tag clouds. They are striking graphic statements. Beyond presenting word frequency data, wordles revel in the possibilities of color, typography, and composition. In turn, users seem to revel in the possible applications: scientists wordle genetic functions, fans wordle music videos, teachers wordle literary texts, spouses wordle love letters, kids wordle their thoughts, and journalists wordle political speeches. Wordles have made their way into corporate PowerPoint slides and houses of worship they have adorned T-shirts, magazine covers and comfy cushions. Wordles have graced YouTube videos, homemade gifts, posters, scrapbooks, birthday cards, and valentines. To be sure, some people create wordles to engage in data analysis, but they are a minority. Indeed, there is evidence that a significant number of users do not even understand what the graphics are encoding. (Whether wordles qualify as an effective analytic tool is up for debate and we discuss this question below.) One might conclude on these grounds that wordles are ���mere��� entertainment, and that their popularity is no more interesting than that of a hit movie or a cute Facebook application. Indeed, the Wordle site describes itself as ���a toy.��� Yet such a simple explanation does not capture the complexity of Wordle���s usage. While people do report making wordles ���for fun,��� they show an impressive level of creativity in using its output. This paper examines the source of Wordle���s popularity: what makes it tick and what draws people to it. By studying spontaneous usage of Wordles on the web, and by running a survey with thousands of respondents, we start to unravel the Wordle riddle. We suggest that a key message of the Wordle phenomenon is that scientific-style data analysis is not the only raison d'��tre of visualization tools. Our results suggest that Wordle usage may be viewed as a component of ���participatory culture��� (in the sense of Jenkins [5]): a cultural system in which viewers are also producers and remixers, and where visualization serves as much as an authoring tool as a method of analysis. 1.1 Related work Our work relates to several streams of investigation in visualization. Tag clouds, simple visualizations that display word frequency information via font size, have been in use on the web since 1997 [13]. In recent years, several sites have arisen that create tag clouds from user input. These range from single-purpose tools such as TagCrowd [7] or The Tag Cloud Generator [10] to more general visualization sharing sites such as Many Eyes [12]. Researchers also have looked at ways to improve on traditional tag cloud layouts. Seifert et al. [7], for instance, created an algorithm to efficiently place rectangles into arbitrary polygons, and used that to create more tightly packed word clouds, while Gambette and Veronis recently introduced the ���Tree Cloud��� [TK]. Wordle fits directly into both these traditions. One of the themes of this paper is the importance of non-analytic uses of visualization, an observation that others have made as well. The ��� Fernanda Vi��gas, Martin Wattenberg, and Jonathan Feinberg are with IBM Research, E-Mail: [viegasf, mwatten, jdf]@us.ibm.com. Manuscript received 31 March 2009 accepted 27 July 2009 posted online 11 October 2009 mailed on 5 October 2009. For information on obtaining reprints of this article, please send email to: tvcg@computer.org .