Jacob Harris of the New York Times writes in his article titled “Word Clouds Considered Harmful”  that “visualization is reporting” and goes on to say visualizations should “…pare away extraneous information to find a story in the data…to help the reader understand the basics of the subject…” For many reasons I find these expectations especially hard to satisfy with word clouds. Not so much because they contain extraneous information but rather information that only just begins to lend itself to comprehensively conceptualizing a story. The data is comprised of individual words which in many ways are significant to the tale, but does nothing to elaborate on how they relate to tell the story. This lack of conceptual depth can easily lead the interpreter of the visual to invalid conclusions. Harris also adds a helpful bit of advice to anyone interested in creating data analysis visualizations when he claims “Prettiness is a bonus; if it obliterates the ability to read the story of the visualization, it’s not worth adding”

        Considering all of the aforementioned, when deciding which program to use for visualizing a contextual analysis of Aurthur Doyle’s The Adventure of the Speckled Band,  I based my decision on an incentive to analyze the text as practically as possible. Therefore I chose to sacrifice the customizable aesthetics of wordle for the more customizable analysis offered by voyant.

The trade off, initially inclined to improve the effectiveness of the analysis, did little to enhance an understanding of the story for any potential reader. For someone who has never read the story there are ceaseless misconceptions this cloud could beget. For instance one with no prior exposure to the story might see the words “died” and “watson” of similar size and perhaps infer that Watson meets his fate or even “holmes” considering his name is also a part of the cloud. These words present the subjects and topics that arise in the story but give no insight as to how they collectively form conflicts/resolutions or characters and setting which without any prior knowledge of the tale makes them near useless. Analogously like being given only a few of the most abundant ingredients in a recipe without other vital ingredients and instructions on how to mix them to make the desired end product.  The most practical application for this word cloud, although no groundbreaking achievement, would be to highlight significant themes to reference for someone who already read The Adventure of the Speckled Band and knows how those themes actualize the story.