Word Cloud - Beta (TAPoRware)
This tool generates a word cloud of the top frequency words from a text document, with word size determined by its frequency. The user can specify how many words are to be included from the document, whether to apply a modified Glasgow Stop Words list, and the order in which the words are displayed. Clicking on a word in the resultant word cloud will generate a concordance for that word. This tool is currently only available for plain text documents. Should the user provide an HTML or XML text, all tags will be stripped and it will be processed as plain text.
This tool’s functionality has been incorporated into Voyant available online at www.voyant-tools.org.
Documentation
Creator(s): Geoffrey Rockwell et. al.
Creator's Site: http://geoffreyrockwell.com/
Creator's Email: grockwel@ualberta.ca
Repository:
Attributes
- Type of analysis: Visualization Analysis
- Type of license: Free
- Web Usable: Run in Browser
- Ease of Use: Easy
- Warning: No longer supported
- Tool Family: TAPoRware
- Historic Tool (developed before 2005): Discontinued (no longer available)
- TaDiRAH Goals: Analysis
- TaDiRAH Methods: Other (analysis) Statistical Analysis Visualization
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Word Cloud (Beta) is a free, easy to use web-based tool designed to run in a browser window. It generates a list of high-frequency words from plain text document at a user-specified web address or from the user's files, and visualizes them in a Java-enhanced web page that sizes words based on that frequency.
There are a few options available for this tool. Users may limit the number of top words appearing in the cloud and choose whether or not to apply the Glasgow stop list. Once the page has loaded, the user can view the number of times a word appears in the text by hovering their cursor over that word, or click on the word to view a concordance for it.
The results may be displayed by appearance, frequency or alphabetically, and users can enable or disable a fixed layout on the results page.
This tool has only a few problems. When identifying words, it tends to include punctuation such as quotation marks. The size scaling of the least frequent to most frequent words in the cloud is not sufficiently diverse to allow for the clear distinction between words when the cloud is generated from 50 or less of the top words. In addition, while it will accept HTML and XML documents, it strips all tagging and processes it as if it were plain text.
Despite these limitation, Word Cloud (Beta) is an effectively enriched variation on the standard a word cloud for visualizing high frequency words in a document.