Visuals, 1: Word Clouds

I mentioned in a previous post about nonstandard ways of presenting verbatim data and mentioned creating a word cloud.  In case you are not aware of what a word cloud is, or how it can be used, I thought I would use this blog as a demonstration.  I took all the words from the long posts to this blog and put them into a word cloud generator.¹ 

Outside of it being based off word counts (though some get crazy with the numbers, plotting them by square roots, or logs of word counts), there is no hard math here.  You can tweak the visual (the form, whether the words are all aligned, etc.) but the underlying math is basic.  These are more about looking for patterns that are not necessarily obvious.  Below is the word cloud I created.  The only edit I did on the source data is standardizing the plurals, so doctors/doctor, nurses/nurse, and leaders/leader.  If you only knew this blog by this visual, what would you deduce is its main theme? 

When I looked at it, I was not surprised that patient was dominant.  I was a little surprised that hospital was as big as it was but not startled.  The thing that surprised me was that the words can and will were as big as they were.  I try to keep this blog focused on the positive and solution-oriented, so seeing positive action-oriented words like them being so prominent makes me feel like my intent is being realized.  Now, the real question is whether it is being realized by the readers, but this visualization at least is evidence that the value present. 

¹There are a number of them and, after trying a few, I settled on the one I have used in the past.  https://www.wordclouds.com/