Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Cloudy Words

Our three quality of life teams have been using word clouds as useful tools to identify patterns in the answers they received from their interviews with Venetians of all ages. This example, provided by Tobin McGee, shows the most important words as far as young Venetians are concerned.  Notice how "expensive", "tourism" and "social life" feature prominently.  We're working on variations on this theme, creating separate clouds for positive and negative connotations (e.g. Rythm is positive whereas Housing is negative), as well as along gender-specific dimensions (e.g. ShopVariety which was mentioned by women but not men).  The colors in this cloud were assigned randomly by wordle the online tool we've been using for this task.  More cloudy weather ahead...