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Textual Portraits: Using Word Clouds as an Analysis Tool for Digitized Texts

Shonn Haren

Wichita State University Libraries

February 28, 2015

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Visualizing the Text

“…often the most effective way to describe, explore and summarize a set of numbers-even a very large set-is to look at pictures of those numbers.”

– Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

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Word Clouds for Text Search

• Google Books– https://books.google.com– Accessible from the books’

record page– Click on a word to see the places

where it occurs within the text.

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Word Clouds for Textual Analysis

• Brad Borevitz’ State of the Union Website– http://

stateoftheunion.onetwothree.net/index.shtml

– Compare the clouds of Speeches from Washington to Obama

– Track the use of terms over time

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What are Word Clouds?

• Machine-readable text is broken down into its component words

• Common words (a, an, the, etc…) are filtered out

• Remaining words are assigned values based on frequency of use

• Words arranged randomly in a cloud, with their size determined by their frequency of use:

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The Bill of Rights

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The Gettysburg Address

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Comparing Word Clouds

Topeka Constitution Lecompton Constitution

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Comparing Word Clouds

Topeka Constitution Lecompton Constitution

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So How does this work?

• http://www.wordle.net

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Benefits and Drawbacks

• Benefits– Wordle.net is free to use– Shallow Learning Curve– Images produced can be

used for outreach too

• Drawbacks– Text must be machine-

readable– Synonyms aren’t

eliminated– Archaic

texts/translations have uncommon common words that must be manually removed

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In Conclusion…

• Word Clouds don’t replace traditional textual analysis or reading

• A first glance tool for comparing unfamiliar texts with minimal metadata

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Any Questions?