What I found was a neat tool called Wordle. No, not that wordle! “Wordle” is a tool used for generating word clouds from the text that is pasted. Sadly the original “Wordle” has been shut down (not sure why, but maybe because of the new inferior wordle??), but luckily, there is another version called EdWordle! It’s very similar to Voyant Tools, however, what I find it to also be very beneficial is that, unlike Voyant Tools, it’s a bit easier to enter individual words.
Here’s how it works:
- Select the “Create Now” button. Or you try one of the examples provided at the bottom by selecting “Edit It”
2. Past/Type the text, then click “First Generate a Wordle”. You can change what’s being shown in your cloud by editing it on the right.
3. For this example, I used the script for the film “Bee Movie”. Let’s try adding a word
4. Click on “Add Word”, type one and add a weight between 0 and 1. Edit: You do not have to use whole numbers! Using decimals (like 0.6) will change the size of the word. You’ll see in the next step what the biggest size of a word can be with “1”
You can see Shrek being added at the bottom!
5. There are many other features to try!
Why was Shrek so big if it was only added once with a weight of 1? The weight part is a little confusing, but the rest of the tutorial is well done and easy to follow.
I’ll add this in later, but think of 1 as something bigger (like 100). You can also add decimals, so if I did 0.1, shrek would be very tiny. I do not understand why they chose to do it like this, but there would definitely be better results had I manually added Shrek in the actual script.
In defense of Voyant, it does actually allow you to provide text in a text box! With that said, I think you meant entering individual words, which Voyant doesn’t do so well with. I think your tutorial might be pointing out that EdWordle may have more control over how your data is visualized — size etc — than Voyant. Maybe EdWordle might work better for presentation, while Voyant is great for larger analyses? Voyant has the advantage of allowing a ton of text at once via multiple files, but you seem to be able to edit data much better in EdWordle — maybe that is a distinction that might be worth noting in the future.
Yeah, you’re right. It’s a bit more challenging to make those changes in Voyant Tools. I’ll make those changes. Thank you!