Word clouds continue to be a popular tool for summarizing textual information, despite their well-documented deficiencies for analytic tasks. Much of their popularity rests on their playful visual appeal. In this paper, we present the results of a series of controlled experiments that show that layouts in which words are arranged into semantically and visually distinct zones are more effective for understanding the underlying topics than standard word cloud layouts. White space separators and/or spatially grouped color coding led to significantly stronger understanding of the underlying topics compared to a standard Wordle layout, while simultaneously scoring higher on measures of aesthetic appeal. This work is an advance on prior research on semantic layouts for word clouds because that prior work has either not ensured that the different semantic groupings are visually or semantically distinct, or has not performed usability studies. An additional contribution of this work is the development of a dataset for a semantic category identification task that can be used for replication of these results or future evaluations of word cloud designs.

Word clouds continue to be a popular tool for summarizing textual information, despite their well-documented deficiencies for analytic tasks. Much of their popularity rests on their playful visual appeal. In this paper, we present the results of a series of controlled experiments that show that layouts in which words are arranged into semantically and visually distinct zones are more effective for understanding the underlying topics than standard word cloud layouts. White space separators and/or spatially grouped color coding led to significantly stronger understanding of the underlying topics compared to a standard Wordle layout, while simultaneously scoring higher on measures of aesthetic appeal. This work is an advance on prior research on semantic layouts for word clouds because that prior work has either not ensured that the different semantic groupings are visually or semantically distinct, or has not performed usability studies. An additional contribution of this work is the development of a dataset for a semantic category identification task that can be used for replication of these results or future evaluations of word cloud designs.

Today's Internet industry suffers from several well-known pathologies, but none is as destructive in the long term as its resistance to evolution. Rather than introducing new services, ISPs are presently moving towards greater commoditization. It is apparent that the network's primitive system of contracts does not align incentives properly. In this study, we identify the network's lack of accountability as a fundamental obstacle to correcting this problem: Employing an economic model, we argue that optimal routes and innovation are impossible unless new monitoring capability is introduced and incorporated with the contracting system. Furthermore, we derive the minimum requirements a monitoring system must meet to support first-best routing and innovation characteristics. Our work does not constitute a new protocol; rather, we provide practical and specific guidance for the design of monitoring systems, as well as a theoretical framework to explore the factors that influence innovation.