A new way to produce Word Clouds – Word Cloud Plus (BETA)

Published by Ray Poynter, 3 December 2022

With William Poynter, I have been developing a better way to create word clouds. It is now in open BETA and we are looking for as many people as possible to give it a try and to send us some feedback. You can try our BETA version of Word Cloud Plus at https://wordcloudplus.com/

Word Cloud

A word cloud created from a NewMR project looking at ‘What makes a good presentation?’

If you need a hand in working out how to run it, try this short video

The features that we think help make this more useful are:

  • Biasing it towards phrases rather than single words (you will be able to control the degree of bias in the near future)
  • Allowing you to manually move words around the cloud
  • Clicking on words to find out what the underlying text was
  • Automatically detecting the language and applying the right set of stop words (the are quite a few languages, such as Chinese and Japanese that it can’t do yet)
  • Allowing you to change the font and colour of individual words in the cloud
  • Showing you a summary of all the scores and counts for text you are working with.
  • Having a Replace function to make it easy to change words like AI to Artificial Intelligence, quant to quantitative etc – so that you can see concepts rather than alternative spellings
  • The ability to add and remove stop words (stop words are words like is, and, to that usually add no meaning to a word cloud)

I invite you to give it a try and see how you get on with it.