In a traditional word cloud, the most popular answers (e.g. words, phrases) are emphasized. The result of this emphasis is for the minority to fade away into the background. We are building an Inverted Word Cloud tool, that inverts this relationship and provides a means to amplify minority voices.
A screenshot showing a word cloud generated for the question, "What are the qualities of our Learning Imaginary?"
In this Inverted Word Cloud, the minority answers are emphasised, appearing larger, while the majority responses appear smaller. For example "formative feedback" and "differentiation in design" appear more prominently; where as, "open" and "safety" appear smaller. Visually all of the words are arranged at different angles and appear in different colours. However, the most salient dimension is the size of the font the words are displayed in. It's also worth noting that some of the de-emphasized words are sufficiently small that they are unreadable. If there was no option to invert the word cloud, these ideas would be lost.
For more details, see “Inverted Word Clouds”.