Introduction
Word Cloud or Tag Clouds is a visualization technique for texts that are natively used for visualizing the tags or keywords from the websites. These keywords typically are single words that depict the context of the webpage the word cloud is being made from. These words are clustered together to form a Word Cloud.
Each word in this cloud has a variable font size and color tone. Thus, this representation helps to determine words of prominence. A bigger font size of a word portrays its prominence more relative to other words in the cluster. Word Cloud can be built in varying shapes and sizes based on the creators’ vision. The number of words plays an important role while creating a Word Cloud. More number of words does not always mean a better Word Cloud as it becomes cluttery and difficult to read. A Word Cloud must always be semantically meaningful and must represent what it is meant for.
Although, there are different ways by which Word Clouds can be created but the most widely used type is by using the Frequency of Words in our corpus. And thus, we will be creating our Word Cloud by using the Frequency type.
History
The history of Word Clouds dated back to 1976 when an American Social Psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a Psychological Study and asked people about the places from Paris. The main idea was to build a mental map of Paris when the people were asked about the city. He analyzed and drew a map based on the responses received from people and kept a bigger font size for the frequently received responses
The Tag Clouds came into the limelight when Flickr, a photo-sharing website, in 2006 started using Tag Clouds for site exploration. By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, Word Cloud become a very popular tool among the text miners.
But, the trend of Tag Cloud keeps vacillating and eventually started declining over the period of time. And thus, Word Clouds are being popularly used in today’s world.