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.