Word Cloud: A Case of Identity

March 2, 2015 ~ Annie Swafford

For this project, I decided to make some word clouds based off of the Sherlock Holmes story A Case of Identity. I thought that this project was a fun experience, and it’s definitely something that I’ll try using again. After listening to our guest speaker last class talk about graphic design and how to make our digital projects look more visually pleasing, I was excited to jump into this project. I first decided to make a word cloud using Voyant (as shown below).

I was hoping that when I submitted my story, it would automatically turn out like this, but I had to make a few tweaks with the stop words before I got to this final result that I think turned out pretty well. I think that it emphasizes many of the core themes and major words that you need to know in order to get at least some idea of what the story is about. I don’t think this type of chart in general is the most easy to understand, but it’s visually appealing with the fun colors and the simple font. I also really liked how user-friendly the site was, and it wasn’t hard to make edits to it.

Unfortunately, my ancient computer couldn’t handle any Java or Silverlight updates, so I wasn’t able to use Wordle or Tagxedo. I’m still kinda bummed because I looked at the word clouds that other people posted and they look really cool. But I was informed of another word cloud website called JasonDavies.com (as shown below)

This word cloud is a lot more cluttered than the one from Voyant and I didn’t really enjoy using it. It only lets you change the font, which is a bit restricting when trying to make something look more visually appealing. And after using Voyant, it was a bit disappointing not being able to change anything other than the font. Most of the words are around the same size, so you can’t really tell which words are the most important. If someone who had never read the story before looked at this word cloud, I don’t think they would have a clue what the story was about.

Word Cloud Project: A Scandal in Bohemia

March 2, 2015 ~ Annie Swafford

Word clouds or tag clouds are visual depictions of word occurrence that offer greater importance to words that appear more frequently in a piece of text. Moreover, the larger the word is in the cloud, the more common the word was in the source of text.

For the word cloud project, I chose the Voyant word cloud generator and the Sherlock Holmes story called A Scandal in Bohemia. In the first word cloud that I have created, it shows what was happening at the beginning of the story when Sherlock Holmes receives a letter in the mail from the King of Bohemia who is asking Sherlock Holmes to do him a favor. During this part of the story, the words that show up the most often is paper, german, bohemia, stands, note, and peculiar. These key words help the reader to understand how the story obtained the title it was given because the word “peculiar” describes something unusual like a scandal is going on and the word “bohemia” describes the location that is involved in the peculiarity. Moreover, based on this particular word cloud, I learned that something peculiar is happening and somehow an individual from Bohemia is involved based on a note that Sherlock Holmes has received.

In the second word cloud that I developed, it shows what happened at the end of the story when Sherlock Holmes receives a letter from Irene Adler in regards to the most wanted photograph. During this part of the story, it is evident that some of the words that show up most often are Sherlock Holmes, photograph, know, dear, and really. These fundamental words help the reader understand that Sherlock Holmes did in fact find the photograph but failed to realize how stealthy Irene Adler really is.

Even though using word cloud can be an interesting and creative way to portray information, there are also some negative aspects of this tool. According to the Better Evaluation website, one of the pros of this tool is that there are various word and tag cloud generators that are freely available on the internet and creating them is really straightforward. However, based on the Nieman Lab article word clouds can be considered a negative tool because word clouds support only the crudest sorts of textual analysis. In addition, word clouds focus on only the occurrence of specific words instead of concepts and ideas that are important and will help you understand what is going on. Lastly, Word clouds leave the readers to figure out the context of the data by themselves because they have to translate what the jumble of words are trying to depict and explain.

Word Cloud Assignment_DeFranco

March 2, 2015 ~ Annie Swafford

The first word cloud tool I used was Voyant. I liked this site because it let me customize how I wanted my word cloud to look down the the word. I like that there were adjustable settings that gave you the chance to decide what you want to emphasize and what you want to be smaller or even not show up at all. This would be a good tool for a company that wanted to use interesting graphics to further a brand or for name recognition. It is colorful and dynamic and lets you include an unlimited amount of text and chooses the most common words but lets you call the shots afterwards. I do wish, however that there were more design customization options. I would like to chose the colors to match the theme I’m working with. For example I might make this particular word cloud grey 50 shades of grey (no pun intended) because black and white alludes to the time period.

I have to say that I had a really hard time getting either of the two programs to work on my computer. They both required me to install additional programs on my laptop that when I tried to, completely froze up everything to the point where I had to manually restart my computer. Twice. And I fought with there programs for almost an hour. So rather than risking breaking my laptop I’m supplementing another word cloud program that I learned because it’s the one we use for our campus’s online alternative magazine, The Little Rebellion, for which I am a contributing editor. It’s quick, simple, and very user friendly. Again there are not many customization tools but it makes a clean rectangular image and you can customize the font with any typeface from the Microsoft Word suite. We use these word clouds as backgrounds for other things–lower the opacity and there ya go.

Adventures in Word Cloud

March 2, 2015 ~ Annie Swafford

For the word cloud assignment I used two different word cloud tools to generate images based off of Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Speckled Band. This was honestly my favorite Sherlock Holmes story I read as a kid and I was excited to see the story in a new light using these tools. For the first image I used Wordle to generate a word cloud.

I have to admit, I really loved using this site. Not only was it extremely easy to figure out, but I loved the way this word cloud looks. I’m a fan of a more sleek, professional style so this image really interested me. Unsurprisingly “Holmes” is the most used word in the story, but I was intrigued by the focus on titles of people rather then their names. Furthermore, clearly the room played a large role within the story. I was surprised not to see “Speckled” or “band” in larger roles within the story since not only are they the title, but they’re the main facts of the story. Overall I really enjoyed this website and I’ll definitely be using this again. Screen Shot 2015-03-02 at 10.23.44 PM

For the second image I used Tagxedo to create a second word cloud. I have to be honest, I really hated thiswebsite. It seemed incredibly outdated and unprofessional, one example being that it featured font titles named “Avril Lavigne.”I just found it difficult to use and childish. The final image disappointed me, I feel as though it looks like something a fifth grader made in art class half-heartedly. Overall, I felt as though Tagxedo was not helpful in creating a decent word cloud that was visually appealing. For the word cloud itself, I was surprised to see the word “sister” larger in this image, as I honestly felt as though the two word clouds would give the same words higher preference. This word cloud focused much more on the scenery and setting rather than other aspects of the story. Overall, I found this activity enjoyable and interesting, and it’s something I would definitely do again in my own free time.

Word Cloud: A Scandal in Bohemia

March 2, 2015 ~ Annie Swafford

I have in the past used Wordle to create a word cloud for a school project so I had no trouble with that site but I did have issues using Voyant and could not get it to delete additional stop words beyond what were in the dictionary for the English option.

I think the Wordle word cloud makes it easier to understand the story because more of the stop words were not on it. You can clearly tell from both clouds that Holmes is the key component in the story. Additionally, “photograph” is one of the largest words in both clouds, it actually appears to be the second largest in the Wordle word cloud. This tells you that the main focus of the story is about a photograph which is important because that is exactly what Holmes is trying to retrieve throughout the tale. The words King, Majesty, and woman/Irene are also clearly visible. Irene is very important in the story not only because she is originally who Holmes is searching for but also because she changes Holmes’ view on woman in general. King and Majesty appearing larger tells one that the story is about a case that entails some sort of royalty. Some words that are larger that do not play main roles in the plot are door, one, must, said, minutes, house, face, and hand. These words though not stop words per-say do not pertain to the plot in a way that one can understand through the word cloud. This is a huge con of using a word cloud- that unimportant words are shown and can throw off the plot of the story. Words like that can make it more difficult to understand what the tale is about. A huge pro though is the complete opposite and that is being able to get the general idea of a story in just a glance. One can view a word cloud and get an overview of important parts or more of words within a story. Overall, I think word clouds are visually appealing but not that helpful in this instance.

wordle

Head In The Word Clouds, Feet On The Ground

March 2, 2015 ~ Annie Swafford

Story: Scandal In Bohemia

Overall, I thought that the word cloud project was an interesting experience for sure. After listening to our guest speaker go over how the aesthetics of a data platform can truly effect how it’s absorbed by the audience, I was eager to delve into it. However, once I got into it I came to the conclusion that they aren’t really that informative. If you’ve already read the story, then of course it’s going to reinforce the common themes present in the readings! Despite my thoughts on this, I did like the design factor of the project and hope that we can do more of that this semester!

Here is my first word cloud, from Voyant. Overall, I thought that it turned out well. But the program was not very user-friendly. It appeared that it needed to be updated. I wasn’t sure if there was a way to change the colors, shapes, or alignment of the words because it was confusing to use. Also, the jargon used like “corpus” was outdated and I wasn’t sure what it even meant.

In terms of the words present, I wasn’t really surprised at all which were the most popular.I feel as if the largest word in all of our projects is going to be Holmes.

The same can be said for the following word cloud, from Wordle.

I really liked using this tool a lot more because it was very straight-forward. User friendly programs are a huge plus in a project like this! As I just said, the words that appeared didn’t really surprise me all that much, either. Both of my word clouds are pretty similar, I think. King and photograph are two of the larger words up there, and as we know from reading the story, those are two important themes.

In part of this assignment, we also had to read two articles. I thought that the second one was pretty comical, and at the same time, agreeable. Because I’m a journalism student, I saw exactly where the author was coming from in terms of how a word cloud sometimes doesn’t illustrate the substance of a story at all. In journalistic writing, we actually avoid using similar words if we possibly can, unless it is the proper title of document, a study, a group, the name of a person, etc. We try to use synonyms as much as we can to crack any monotony in the bud and make our writing more colorful and appealing. In short, there’s probably close to 10 different words that can be swapped out throughout a story that essentially mean the same thing.

“Prettiness is a bonus; if it obliterates the ability to read the story of the visualization, it’s not worth adding some wild new visualization style or strange interface.”

In fiction works, such as a Holmes story, I noticed that word clouds are totally useful in illustrating some of the main concepts that are present. I think that analyzing word usage this way definitely has its benefits, but the analysis can’t end there. One of the larger duties in analyzing text is being able to identify what these themes actually mean. I do not think, however, that word clouds can substitute the true analytical thinking needed to process what these themes mean in the grand scheme of the plot. The initial thought of the word clouds is cool, but I think that there may be better tools out there to successfully show the themes of the story that looks more into substance and not just the word count.

Word Clouds- Mullet or Man-bun?

March 2, 2015 ~ Annie Swafford

I would like to just start off by saying, man, that guy who wrote the article against word clouds is a real downer. He “dies a little inside” every time he see’s one? Come on Jacob Harris, be a little more dramatic, please. Anyway, I personally enjoyed the simplicity and usefulness of word clouds especially on the Voyant website. I submitted the text from “A Case of Identity” and was not really surprised at my findings. The words “Holmes” and “Said” were written 46 and 45 tim A Case of Identity Word Cloud es. Not much of a surprise there. An interesting things was the addition of last names. Holmes obviously being the biggest since he is the most important character smaller names also provide detail and allows the viewer to see which characters are of utmost importance and which are subsequently less important. The word “typewritten” appeared six times throughout the story and for a second I wondered why, six seemed like quite a lot. Then I remembered that is exactly how Holmes solved the case in the end. Once clicking on the word “typewritten” I saw the pattern where it was mentioned here and there starting in the middle and then one last time at the end signifying he had solved the case.

I enjoyed using this and I do believe that it is helpful. Jacob Harris clearly has some residual feelings or some bad experiences with word clouds because they shouldn’t cause anyone to die a little inside unless you somehow found one for your own eulogy. That might be sad. Clearly a map of deaths and casualties in Bagdad would serve a better purpose than a word cloud on the subject but that is kind of biased example to use…Jacob. I think that it could be very useful in many situations, seeing patterns of certain authors and various other writing styles.

In the end, word clouds are neither mullets or man buns. They are in fact just an ordinary haircut, what matters is who is rocking that hair cut that makes or breaks it. I mean, Brad Pitt could rock any haircut, find a better example Jacob and calm down a bit.

http://www.popsugar.com/beauty/Brad-Pitt-Best-Hair-Moments-34150806#photo-interstitial-1

Brad Pitt would be a great word cloud.

Words Clouds: Form over Function

March 2, 2015 ~ Annie Swafford

After reading an editor from the New York Times disparage the utilization of word clouds, I had similar thoughts running through my mind as I endeavored upon this assignment. What deep insight can be gained from tallying Arthur Conan Doyles’ choice of words? I chose his story A Scandal in Bohemia to investigate the importance of word clouds.

Screen Shot 2015-03-02 at 2.08.44 PM — The “photograph” was thematically important to the story, as the word clouds would establish

I began with Wordle, and then planned to also use Tagxedo for some word cloud fun. I chose these two based on the fact that Voyant‘s learning curve may have been longer because stop words would have to manually removed. I preferred to try to understand the first two applications thoroughly.

I found Wordle very easy to use, and yet complex enough to change the word clouds’ appearance fairly significantly. It removes the common words automatically, although you can adjust that, as well as the font, the colors (both background and the letters) and the layout. This final option dictates how many words are included, which direction they face, and if the cloud is round or jaggedly shaped.

I began with gray and black words with a white background, remembering the design principles from class last week. This was called the Ghostly color setting. I sought to add a touch of color, and chose the Heat setting. I found this to be the most pleasing combination I had found. Finally, I wanted to make a kaleidoscope of color to test the outer bounds of the application.

Movie Poster? — Potential first draft movie poster for *A Scandal in Bohemia (*click to enlarge) created with Tagxedo

After learning a bit about the basics of word clouds, I hoped to create something more unique and memorable. The above word cloud was made with Tagxedo, using the sunset color scheme and aligned in the shape of Great Britain. One of the best features Tagxedo offers (which Wordle doesn’t) is the variety of shapes in which the words can be arranged. There were several geographic options, including Australia, South America and Great Britain, the latter of which was perfect considering Holmes London address. In addition to the options I did change, there were even more in the word/layout options menu on the left-hand side which I hope to investigate in the future.

Overall, this visualization tool can help to illuminate potential themes in a literary work. Photograph and Adler are two of many words that appear in the word cloud, making it clear that each is vital to the story. The confusion regarding the photo leads Doyle to increase the suspense, and Irene Adler’s name is used frequently because Holmes calls her the woman. The word cloud is simply another tool at the disposal of a digital humanities scholar.

I plan to try this with a yet-to-be decided text for exploration beyond Sherlock Holmes. Underlying themes can reveal themselves, or at the very least an artistic graphic can be created for a favorite piece of literature. Both design and literature interest me, so this was an intriguing assignment that I enjoyed thoroughly.

Word Clouds: How to Decipher the Floating Text

March 2, 2015 ~ Annie Swafford

Voyant WordCloud Phillips — Voyant Word Cloud Example

My experience with word clouds has always been for fun. It might be a bit weird to analyze William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech (here’s a link, it’s awesome), but what else would I do with my time?

I used Tagxedo and Voyant to make my clouds of The Red-Headed League by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Tagxedo was exceedingly simple to use, which was nice. Stop words were already included.Your creation becomes shareable on social media platforms, mugs, and t shirts. Nice feature there, as the word clouds are very pretty. You can create your own color schemes, choose what shape your cloud is, and so on. I liked that feature, but I can see how you could get carried away design wise. If you want a neon pink, mustard yellow, and brown colored Abraham Lincoln shaped visualization, it can happen. Please don’t.

Tagxedo didn’t have much function in analyzing the words. The data and stats are much more accessible via Voyant. The corpus reader section especially paired the word cloud with the text, and its search function was a strong addition to the site. Also, I liked how easy it was to edit the stop words.Voyant didn’t have as much design flair, but I thought the explicit word breakdown made up for it.

Tagexdo WordCloud Phillips — Tagxedo Word Cloud Example: Sherlock Holmes figure and red-headed inspired text for aesthetic purposes.

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Working with Word Cloud: sometimes disappointing

March 1, 2015 ~ Annie Swafford

It is enjoyable for me choosing the better design options, what I could exercise with Word Cloud. However, I felt disappointed about some limitations of the platforms. On Wordle and Voyant I couldn’t eliminate some words that I thought unnecessary to display. My intention was to tell The Speckled Band story, so that, I wanted to use just the words that were meaningful to the it.

Therefore, I tried to eliminate verbs that are meaningless. “Shall”, “may”, “might”, “see”, “come” are common verbs in any text, and kept showing up. “One”, “way” “little”, “hand”, “last”, now, “round”, “side” are also examples of words that kept showing up and don’t mean anything out of the story’s context.

For me, the platform Voyant is not user-friendly at all. The options are not clear and I didn’t manage to exclude any of the meaningless words. The icons are small, a lot of windows shows up at the same time, what makes it confusing to navigate. Besides that, I didn’t find options to change the color or the design of my Word Cloud. The only interesting resource that I have found was the graphic that shows the appearance of a word per segment of the text.

On Wordle the resource of eliminating word was not so good as on Tagxedo, which platform I considered the most user-friendly, and also the one that contains the bigger variety of resources. There I could click on each word that were frequent on the text, but I wanted to eliminate. On Wordle, it wasn’t possible, but at least I could limit the maximum number of words, what helped me to discard some meaningless words.