
Word Clouds could be Considered Harmful: careful consideration of the argument against word clouds. Tagcrowd: TagCrowd allows you to create word clouds in three different ways: by pasting the text of a document into the tool by adding the url of a webpage or by uploading a file to the tool. Tagxedo: this tool can be used to create word clouds direct from web pages, twitter feeds, search results and RSS feeds. Wordle: this tool is easy to use and creates word clouds in a variety of shapes and colours Word Cloud Generator Guide: this guide provides a clear and concise guide to using Word Cloud Generatorġ2 valuable Wordle tips you must read: great tips on working with word clouds, including how to save the file and how to construct compound words Tools If used for reporting, communicate the limitations of the visualization with the audience Resources Guide

For example, interview transcripts, may have common conversational fillers such as “you know” or “like” that need to be removed.Įnsure that the data collection team documents key words consistently– with consistent capitalization – since some software packages will not recognize capitalized and uncapitalized words as the same. Take time to clean up the data before importing it into the word cloud generator. Because of these limitations, word clouds are best suited for exploratory qualitative analysis.Ĭareful consideration of the argument against word clouds Advice for USING this option (tips and traps) They also do not provide context, so the meaning of individual words may be lost. Word clouds will not accurately reflect the content of text if slightly different words are used for the same idea (for example, ‘large’, ‘huge’, ‘giant’, ‘enormous’, and ‘big’).

One of the challenges of interpreting word clouds is that the display emphasizes frequency of words, not necessarily their importance. Word clouds are an easy to use and inexpensive option for visualizing text data.

Advice Advice for CHOOSING this option (tips and traps) Source: Sisters Of The Road (2002) Voices of Homelessness: a qualitative database from sisters of the road.
