A Wordcloud in Python by Andreas Mueller.
From the post:
Last week I was at Pycon DE, the German Python conference. After hacking on scikit-learn a lot last week, I decided to to something different on my way back, that I had planned for quite a while:
doing a wordl-like word cloud.I know, word clouds are a bit out of style but I kind of like them any way. My motivation to think about word clouds was that I thought these could be combined with topic-models to give somewhat more interesting visualizations.
So I looked around to find a nice open-source implementation of word-clouds … only to find none. (This has been a while, maybe it has changed since).
“Andy” walks through the construction of a word cloud in Python.
Looking at his renderings, I think I know why I don’t appreciate word clouds as much as they deserve.
I am trying to “read” the words as text, not observing them in unknown relationships to each other.
Word clouds may work for you or your users and if they do, use them.
But be aware there are users who find them nearly useless.