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word clouds

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The point of it...

Many of the lists in WordSmith offer a word cloud feature similar to those you have probably seen on the web. The idea is to promote pattern-noticing.

 

How to get here

This function is accessed from the Compute menu, sub menu-item Word Cloud (WSImage_577_WordCloud_24) in the various Tools.

 

Examples

In this case of collocates of cash you can get a word cloud based on any column of data.

 

With Concord clusters based on cash, this example was computed:

cluster_word_cloud

In the case of key words, you can get something like this:

 

kw_word_cloud_lear

In this case the word cloud was based on the key words of the Shakespeare play, King Lear. Details of the highlighted word daughters are shown to the right.

 

What you can see and do

The Copy, Print and Save buttons do what their names suggest. The Refresh button recalculates the cloud, e.g. after you have deleted items in the original data or changed settings in the Controller.

As your mouse hovers over a word in the cloud you get details of that individual word.

You can change the word cloud settings in the main Colours setting in the Controller. To force lower-case, Title case or UPPER case for the display, set the Layout settings first.

 

The font sizes reflect the range of values in your data. The font is the one you may choose for any of your standard displays.

There are some settings including minimum font size you can play with, visible at the bottom right of the (resizeable) word cloud window.