Brian on 03 Feb 2019 16:32:40
I must say upfront that I detest word clouds. I detest them because of the cognitive load required to make sense of the jumbled mess of words that are presented to the viewer. One small change to a word cloud however makes them ENORMOUSLY useful: arrange the words in descending count order. In doing so, the reader sees a story unfold in the size, font, and (optionally) color of the words presented. I know this works from experience. I was part of a development group inside my large company that implemented this approach on a system that contained 45 million records in maintenance-oriented data sets that went back to the 1960s. The support engineers who used this system really liked the word cloud arranged this way.