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We report on an online study that compares three different representations to show topic diversity in social media threads: a word-sized visualization, a background color, and a text representation. Our results do not provide significant evidence that people gain knowledge about topic diversity with word-sized visualizations faster than with the other two conditions. Further, participants who were shown word-sized visualizations performed tasks with equally few or only slightly fewer errors.
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Huth et al. (2021) studied this question.