Dynamic Documents And Word Clouds

Dynamic Documents

In class, I pitched an idea for teaching you dynamic documents with word clouds.

What is a dynamic document? A dynamic document has text and possibly headings and other features, like bold and underline, lists, etc. But more importantly it accesses data (either by loading it from a file or in our case connecting to twitter and asking for it), then processes the data and derives summaries and figures to put in the document.

Dynamic documents are powerful.

Say you have data. You write a paper or report based on that data. Then you collect more data, or fix some problem with the data. If you write the dynamic document properly, when the data changes, all you have to do is press one button and all of the statistics and all of the figures get updated everywhere in the entire document.

If you had to update every statistic and every figure in the document, every time the data changed, this would take a long time and be prone to error. Dynamic documents are the way to go.

Word Clouds

I was inspired by the recent (2016) election to address the following question: what is going on with our culture? What better way to do that than to mine the twitter archive? There are many sophisticated techniques you could learn and it would take a whole career to stay on top of them. I wanted to create a dynamic document, easily customizable, which would graphically display some cultural information from twitter. After poking around with Google, I settled on a word cloud. A word cloud is a graphical display of the frequency of words, in this case, the frequency of words that appear in a random sample of tweets that satisfy certain search criteria. The more frequent the word, the larger it appears. Word clouds can code frequency with color, as well.