Word clouds are a useful way of condensing large amounts of text. Obviously, they don’t perfectly describe complex ideas but they can highlight what a text is about in an easy-to-digest manner. Word clouds typically let the number of times a word is used dictate its size in the cloud. Interesting colors and exotic placement of the words allow for the reader to pick out important terms. As such, I thought I would start the year with a word cloud based upon this blog. What about word clouds and Marketing Thought?
What Words Has This Blog Focused On?
Doing a word cloud from this blog was pretty simple:
First I downloaded all the text from the blog into a plain text file.
I next uploaded the text into Mathematica. For those who don’t have Mathematica, there are plenty of free-to-use programs available. e.g., wordart. (2021 I would now suggest R is a really easy — and free way to do this, e.g., https://www.r-graph-gallery.com/wordcloud.html).
Deleting common words that aren’t especially related to the specific topics discussed allows a clearer focus on the keywords in the blog. These include words such as “the”, “at”, “on” and other words that appear commonly in nearly all text not only this blog. These are called Stopwords (which Wikipedia helpfully explains are not to be confused with Safewords). The Mathematica command to use the standard dictionary of words is DeleteStopwords.
Creating the Word Cloud gave the following result.
Word Clouds And Marketing Thought
It turns out that marketing, perhaps unsurprisingly, featured heavily. I’m pleased to say that people also played an important role given their centrality to marketing. Decision, decisions and think are prominent as are consumers, marketers, market and business. I am pretty happy about the result. The coming year(s) will see more of the same.
For more on word clouds see here.
Read: Wordcloud page for details of Wordclouds in Mathematica