3 ways to make text more visual

Last week I taught a session on visualizing data at the Knight Center, highlighting free and easy-to-use multimedia tools. Over the next couple of days, I’ll be posting tutorials on everything we discussed. So far that includes:
• The basics of HTML
• Creating an HTML table from a spreadsheet
• Creating graphics with Google Docs
• Creating interactive graphics with Many Eyes

Today, let’s play with text. A picture is worth 1,000 words, right? So a picture of words must be worth so much more!

Wordle

Wordle is probably my favorite way to look what someone is saying — or how many times they said it. There is no log-in at Wordle — simply hit “create” and decide what kind of word cloud you want to make: Either from text, from an RSS feed or from Delicous tags.

Let’s start with text: President Abraham Lincoln’s 1861 inaugural address. Copy the text (follow that link), paste it into Wordle and hit “go.”

Wordle will find the 150 words repeated the most often; it ignores common words, like “and,” “the,” “an,” and “for,” and numbers unless you tell it otherwise (under the language menu). The larger the word, the more times it was repeated. In Lincoln’s speech, “constitution” was repeated the most — look at “show word counts” under language to see just how many times it was used. If you want two words to show up together — “United” and “States,” for example — put a hyphen between the words, or the HTML code for a non-breaking space:  

You can adjust appearance of your word cloud: Change the font under the font menu; change the layout (including whether the word cloud is horizontal, vertical or anything-goes) under the layout menu; change the color under the color menu.

You can save your word cloud: There’s a “save to public gallery” link on the right below the cloud. (“Public,” of course, means anyone can see it.) If you want to publish your word cloud somewhere else, take a screen capture of it. (You do not have to save the word cloud to screen-grab it.) Open the word cloud in a new window (there’s a button) and make the window the full size of your screen. On a PC, use the print screen button and paste the image into Photoshop or Paint or one of the free photo editing applications; ona Mac, use the Grab application or command-shift-3. Use HTML (the image tag) to add the image to your blog or webpage.

You can also create a word cloud from an RSS feed. RSS, or really simple syndication, is a way to deliver web content that frequently changes — a blog, for example. Look for “RSS” or “subscribe” or the RSS logo, which is often orange. (The logo on this blog is blue, and can be found at the top and bottom of any page.) Create a word cloud from the RSS feed of the White House Press Office.

OK, go ahead and ask: They’re fun, but what would you ever really use a word cloud for? Well, if nothing else it does show a focus. Go ahead — throw the text from your résumé in Wordle; it might surprise you. A few months ago, I used Wordle to compare presidential inaugural addresses. (Look at two war-time presidents to see how language changed: Lincoln’s 1865 speech and George W. Bush’s 2005 speech, for example.)

Many Eyes

First, you might have noticed that Many Eyes lets you create Wordle clouds too. Yep, it’s true. But there are many more fonts and options at the Wordle site. Many Eyes offers other great text visualization tools though, including the word tree and phrase net.

Log in to Many Eyes and create a data set, or use an existing data set. (I’ve already saved Lincoln’s 1861 speech.) Visualize the speech as a word tree, which shows the branching relationship between words. Give Many Eyes a word to start with (from Wordle I already know that “constitution” appears many times) and hit return. Save and publish the graphic, just like yesterday’s Many Eyes tutorial.

Follow the same steps to create a phrase net, which shows how words and phrases relate to each other.

Tomorrow we’ll dive into one of my favorite visualizations, timelines.