  Word clouds are frequently used to analyze and communicate text data in many
domains. In order to help guide research on improving the legibility of word
clouds, we have conducted a survey of their usage in Digital Humanities
academia and journalism. Using a modified grounded theory approach, we sought
to identify the most common purposes for which word clouds were employed and
the most common visual encodings they contained. Our findings indicate that
font size, color, and word placement dominate as the primary data-encoding
channels, as we hypothesized. Perhaps more surprisingly, we found that asking
viewers to perform analytical tasks with word clouds was relatively common,
especially in DH sources. This suggests that research into the interactions of
these visual encoding channels (particularly in regards to legibility) is
warranted.
