Word Clouds

A word cloud is a visual representation of text data in which words are sized according to how frequently they appear - the more often a word occurs in the source text, the larger and bolder it appears in the cloud.

Why Word Clouds Are Useful

• Give an instant, at-a-glance summary of the dominant themes in a body of text
• Work well for presentations and reports where a quick visual is more effective than a table of counts
• Commonly used to explore survey responses, reviews, social media posts, and articles

Generating a Word Cloud in Python

from wordcloud import WordCloud
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

wc = WordCloud(width=800, height=400, background_color="white").generate(text)
plt.imshow(wc, interpolation="bilinear")
plt.axis("off")
plt.show()

Cleaning Text First

Raw text usually needs preprocessing before a word cloud is useful - removing stop words (like "the", "is", "and"), punctuation, and case differences so that the cloud highlights meaningful terms rather than filler words.