Using Wordclouds to Navigate and Summarize Twitter Search Results

This paper describes an application in which wordclouds are used to navigate and summarize Twitter search results. A search on Twitter can return thousands of relevant tweets. By just looking at the first few result pages you will not get an overview of what is discussed in all search results. Our application summarizes sets of tweets into wordclouds, which can be used to get a first idea of the contents of the tweets. Also the application provides the option to zoom in on a certain part of the search results to inspect them in more detail. The application has not been formally evaluated, but we do provide some insights and points for discussion.