The word cloud is a fun and entertaining feature that draws attention and emphasizes the keywords that characterize a notion or concept. The more a term comes up, the more it will be highlighted.
Attention: the word cloud will only be displayed on the presenter’s side and not on your participants’ device. Participants will only be able to submit their answers. As the presenter, this means that you will have to share your screen (be it in person or remotely) in order for them to see how the word cloud progressively changes.
To keep the Word Cloud clean and well-structured, we apply certain rules and transformations to its display.
The transformations we apply
All accents on letters are discarded by default, except if the interface is set to German.
Punctuation (, ; . ? ! :) is replaced with spaces.
Excessive spaces (more than one) are discarded.
All words are changed into capital letters.
Therefore, the words “beyoncé”, “Beyoncé”, “BEYONCE”, “BEYONCÉ”, “beyonce” will all be identical in the word cloud and will be displayed as “BEYONCE”.
Please note that you can also choose to display the accents (or not!) from the settings of your Word cloud question. If the option Ignore accents has been activated, the words “Beyoncé” and “Beyonce” will be considered the same word and appear as “BEYONCE” in the Word cloud. But if the option Ignore accents has not been activated, “Beyoncé” and “Beyonce” will be considered as two different words and appear respectively as “BEYONCÉ” and “BEYONCE” in the Word cloud.
The rules of display
An expression is preserved in its entirety if it consists of less than 30 characters. Otherwise, it is split at its spaces (or punctuation, as mentioned above)
The most frequent words are displayed in a larger size.
At most 50 words will be displayed on screen (in order of recurrence);
If the option “likes on answers” is active, every “like” will count as if the reply had been sent once more. Therefore, for example, 10 likes will be counted as 10 more identical responses.
If the option “Stop Words” is active, a word (or an expression) will not be displayed if it is part of the “stop words” list (see this article for more information). This prevents words like “in” to be displayed by themselves. Note that an expression like “tongue in cheek” will be displayed containing the “in” because it is part of the compound word.
Aside from the transformations described above (concerning capital letters and accents), two words written differently will be displayed individually in the word cloud. Therefore, words like “school” and “schools” will be displayed separately.
If the moderator option is active, answers from your participants will arrive in the small envelope at the bottom right of the presenter screen. From there you can see the answers and choose to display them on the presenter screen or to delete them.
Note that it's also possible for your audience to send emojis!
Our recommendations
Turn on the “Multiple answers” option: this will allow participants to send in as many answers as they'd like, which is generally useful for displaying the different concepts as a word cloud;
Turn on the “Word Cloud” display: in this case, answers will be displayed as a word cloud immediately.
Turn on the “Likes on answers” option: participants will then be able to see each other's answers and click on a little heart to upvote the answer of one of their peers. Functionally speaking, this is identical to sending the same answer. The advantage is that it prevents spelling errors that might occur if the answer is sent in multiple times, thereby causing these answers to be displayed separately.
Add a 30-character limit, which will prevent any answer from being split in two.
Phrase your question in a way that limits the form of a participant's answer. For example, by asking the question as “Today's human is...”, you can influence the form the answers will take and prevent different spellings of the same answer.
Encourage participants to send in one word at a time (without any prepositions etc.) to avoid two similar answers from being considered separately (like “schools” and “the schools”), and remind them to “like” answers instead of sending in their own if it has already been mentioned.
The “Multiple answers” and “Show word cloud” options are now enabled by default when creating the question.