Making Word Clouds

The majority of today’s class consisted of talking and making word clouds. We got into this subject by first talking about text mining. Text mining is taking words and changing them into quantitative data and to do this it uses computer algorithms to analyze numerous texts at once. Creating a word cloud helps with visualizing how frequent a word appears in the text. Often, I see word clouds on ads and I usually see some around the campus. Therefore, using a word cloud is a common thing. In class, we were asked to make a word cloud of a topic of our choice. I did the Jesuit mission which wasn’t a large text, but I realized it didn’t need to be because my word cloud seemed full. After playing with the settings, I noticed I can make my word cloud however I wanted it to look, although, the size of the words wouldn’t change. This is because using an algorithm the word cloud has decided that the larger words would represent that they appear the most. A word cloud is a form of topic modeling because both are finding and tracing clusters of words. Also, they both require trial and error before the results are useful. In my opinion, doing the word cloud was interesting, but I do not see historians using this method often because it seems to me that a word cloud may be used for something fun or light hearted. However, topic modeling is a tool used for discovery and proves to be more useful when you know how to use it.