1 Textual Portraits: Using Word Clouds as an Analysis Tool for Digitized Texts Shonn Haren Wichita State University Libraries February 28, 2015

2 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

3 Word Clouds for Text Search Google Books – – Accessible from the books’ record page – Click on a word to see the places where it occurs within the text.

4 Word Clouds for Textual Analysis Brad Borevitz’ State of the Union Website – netwothree.net/index.sh tml netwothree.net/index.sh tml – Compare the clouds of Speeches from Washington to Obama – Track the use of terms over time

5 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:

6 The Bill of Rights

7 The Gettysburg Address

8 Comparing Word Clouds Topeka Constitution Lecompton Constitution

9 Comparing Word Clouds Topeka Constitution Lecompton Constitution

10 So How does this work?

11 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

12 In Conclusion… Word Clouds don’t replace traditional textual analysis or reading A first glance tool for comparing unfamiliar texts with minimal metadata

13 Any Questions?