ImgWordle: image and text visualization for events in microblogging services

With the wide usage of microblogging services, microposts grow at high rate and provide a rich source of information related to important social events and trends. However, analyzing microposts is challenging due to its high complexity and large volume. In this paper, we present ImgWordle, an interactive visualization prototype to help people perceive and analyze the image and text information in microblogging services. The prototype extends tag cloud by involving images as well as words, and provides multiple coordinated views for a given event, including keywords of various topics, representative images, geographic sentiments and amounts of microposts, and popular microposts over time. We implement ImgWordle on Sina Weibo, the most popular microblogging service in China, and illustrate the usefulness of this visual interface.