Worldle wise, but not wonderful

 

this post as illustrated by wordle (note the word Good highlighted - now read below)
 

Wordle is an automated word cloud generator. Its is good at doing this - it counts the words and displays their incidence in an obvious an visually pleasing manner. (albeit nothing new to many designers used to expressive typography). (I used it here and it worked well)

but... Journalists should look beyond Wordle when analysing election speeches and the like.

Wordle is lousy at assigning meaning. Just because someone mentions 'immigration' a lot in a speech, it doesn't mean they are necessarily for or against it. Articulating the dominant amount of a particular part of data only draws attention to it's frequency - it doesn't inform as to the reasons for the frequency. It should be noted that this is the purpose of much information visualisation - to show important parts of an unclear whole. There is nothing wrong with it but it is only the first stage of understanding something. After that, one should aspire to show more important relationships such as correlation or causation. What it and so much 'automated' visualisations lack is meaningful editting and articulation. A person thinking "what is the story or trend here and how shall I show it?" often delivers something more rewarding.

I have seen a lot of journalists munge a speech/ debate through wordle and claim some kind of revelatory articulation of hidden truths or patterns. True, Bush's post 911 speeches used the word terror a lot - of course they did - no shit, Sherlock - but that revelation is not really journalism and it certainly isn't good visual journalism. The NYT - quite a while ago now - did a comparison of different convention speeches. The comparison of many data elevates the use of these beyind the noticing of single, obvious parts of data. Wordle is not a bad thing as such - its good at one thing - but this one thing is basic. If you are a large media organsiation you may need to think a bit harder about this stuff in these times when your readers (and finance people) want more original journalism (or one could say - you have graphics teams you idiots, use them ( the new york times does, to very good effect).

Comments

[Dan Chambers]

Nice post Max. The poor use of Wordle really bugs me. Too many journalists are dumping a load of text into this app, expecting it to spit out something groundbreaking. Most of the time they just end up with meaningless compositions that present huge words like 'the', 'and' or 'it'.
On the plus side it might make a nice t-shirt?

[Scott Byrne-Fraser]

Late replying to this one....

Fully agree with this post. Word clouds are the fast food of data viz. Quick, easy and cheap, but void of any nutritional value.

The frequency of a word is rarely important. And if it was, there are many better ways of showing frequency.