A
wordcloud
(or tag cloud) is a visual representation of text data. Tags are
usually single words, and the importance of each tag is shown with
font size or color. In R
, two packages allow to create
wordclouds: Wordcloud
and Wordcloud2
.
Wordcloud2
The
Wordcloud2
package by Chiffon Lang is
probably the best way to build
wordclouds
with R. Note that it is a html widget. Thus the default output format
is HTML
. If you need a PNG
or
PDF
, read
this post.
Wordclouds are useful for quickly perceiving the most prominent terms. they are widely used in media and well understood by the public. However, they are criticized for 2 main reasons:
To put it in a nutshell, wordclouds must be avoided. You can read more about that in data-to-viz. Why not considering a lollipop plot or a barplot instead?
Wordcloud
The wordcloud
package is another way to build wordclouds
in R. It does not allow as much customization as
wordcloud2
, but is easy to use and output the chart more
easily to PNG
or PDF
.