Just make sure you record what has been removed for writing up, and what your justification was for excluding it! So it's a good idea to look at the word cloud, and remove words that aren't important to you by adding them to the stop list. You will still get very common words like 'think' and 'she' which might be useful to certain projects looking at expressions of opinions or depictions of gender. By default, Quirkos takes the most 50 frequent words from the verbal and written British National Corpus of words, but 50 is actually a very small stop list. So Quirkos (and many other tools) offer ways to add or remove words from the stop list when you generate a word cloud. Each language will also need a corresponding stop list! They differ greatly between verbal and written language for example (just think how often people might say 'like' or 'um' in speech but not in a typed answer). However, there is always a great deal of variation in what these common words are. That way, more interesting words should be the largest. To make sure that this doesn't swamp the data, most tools will have a list of 'stop' words which should be ignored when displaying the word cloud. We've put together some tips for making sure your word clouds present meaningful information, and also some cautions about how they work and their limitations.Īs these tools count every word in the data, results would normally be dominated by basic words that occur most often, 'the', 'of, 'and' and similar small and usually meaningless words. They are a nice start, but no replacement for good, deep qualitative analysis! However, there are also some limitations to tools based on word frequency analysis, and these tend to be the reason that you rarely see word clouds used in academic papers. They also can reveal some surprises in the data that prompt further investigation. These visualisations are fun, and can be a quick way to give an overview of what your respondents are talking about. There are several free online tools that will generate word clouds for you, being one of the first and most popular. In the latest update for Quirkos, we have added a new and much requested feature, word clouds! I'm sure you've used these pretty tools before, they show a random display of all the words in a source of text, where the size of each word is proportional to the number of times it has been counted in the text. What’s this blog post about? Well, it’s visualised in the graphic above!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
September 2023
Categories |