A word cloud is a visual representation of text data, where the size of each word indicates its frequency or importance. Word clouds are useful for summarizing textual data, identifying trends, and making presentations more interactive. Word clouds are a creative tool to visualize the frequency of key terms in a body of text.
How to make a word cloud? To create a word cloud, start by selecting a word cloud generator or software. Popular options include online tools like WordClouds.com and software applications such as TagCrowd. These tools allow users to input text directly or upload documents. Once the text is added, the generator processes it and creates a word cloud map, where more frequent words appear larger and more prominently.
Customization options are available in most word cloud software, enabling users to change fonts, colors, and shapes to better fit the purpose of the visualization. Some advanced tools even allow users to exclude common words or set a maximum number of words to be displayed.
Generating word clouds online is convenient for quick and easy creation, as they often provide immediate visual feedback and simple sharing options. For more sophisticated needs, desktop software can offer additional features and greater control over the final output.
List of recommended resources #
For a broad overview
Word Cloud: Visualize Word Frequencies
This blog post by MAXQDA gives an overview of word clouds – how to generate them, how to use stop word lists, how to work with word frequency lists, and how to format word clouds to fit one’s requirements.
Word Clouds: We Can’t Make Them Go Away, So Let’s Improve Them
This blog post by Marti Hearst, a professor at UC Berkeley, outlines some problems with word clouds as well as provides some strategies and solutions on how to improve and optimize the use of word clouds in presenting data.
For in depth understanding
Word Cloud Explorer: Text Analytics Based on Word Clouds
This paper by Florian Heimerl, Steffen Lohmann, Simon Lange, and Thomas Ertl conducts an in-depth study of the usefulness of word clouds for general analysis tasks. The authors develop a prototypical system called the Word Cloud Explorer that relies entirely on word clouds as a visualization method.
Word Clouds & the Value of Simple Visualizations
This article gives an in-depth understanding of word clouds and how word cloud visualizations help businesses. It provides various applications of word clouds and also explains cases where they are not the best aligned tools.
Case study
A Study on Word Cloud Techniques for Analysis of Unstructured Text Data
This paper by Won-Jo Lee studies the possibility of commercialization through verification of usefulness and problems when applying the big data word cloud technique. Lee derives the limitations of this technique through a visualization analysis of the “President UN Speech” using the R program word cloud technique as well as proposes an improved model to solve this problem.
Word cloud analysis of the BJGP: 5 years on
This paper by Rob Atenstaedt employs the tool of word clouds to conduct an analysis of the entire content of the British Journal of General Practice (BJGP) from 2011 using the online programme Wordle.
References
https://chartexpo.com/charts/word-cloud
https://datavizcatalogue.com/methods/wordcloud.html
