Creating Word Clouds of Admiration and Desire
Today, I am exploring two brief focused interviews where my participant reflects on an object she admires and an object she desires. After capturing the interview, I generated two word clouds for analysis.
What exactly is a word cloud?
Also known as a tag cloud, a word cloud helps visualize text data. You are essentially looking for the frequency of words in a given text in order to unearth possible themes or patterns; frequent words will appear larger and bolder in color. Word clouds are exploratory qualitative analysis tools; since they are visualizing frequency, they may not accurately depict importance. After constructing and reviewing a word cloud, you should validate your findings with your participants.
My participant admires her laptop
My participant chose her laptop as an object she admired. Here’s the interesting thing; because you are parsing whole speech, placeholders or fillers that people use while they are formulating thoughts (for example, “like”, “kind of”, “you know”) get factored in. In this cloud, the word “kind” sticks out because my participant used “kind of” as a filler. Let’s see what happens when I remove that and the word “like” from the transcript and revisualize the word cloud:
This cloud is more reflective of the interview; “things” appears large because it’s a catchall for the range of activities and possibilities that this laptop allows her to access. “Personality” is highlighted as she noted that through the addition of stickers, she was able to personalize her laptop and it became a reflection of herself. A sentiment not accurately captured in this word cloud was the pride she felt from purchasing the laptop with her own money; in her mind, this meant feeling like an adult. For my participant, admiring an object means the personal connection she has to it.
My participant desires a necklace and bracelet
After understanding my participant’s speech patterns, I removed the filler words and ran the cloud visualizer again. “Thing” refers to the necklace and bracelet set itself; “Already” refers to the point in time when she will eventually purchase this set. A big takeaway from this interview is that she desires to have an object that encapsulates a moment in time, or the memory of the trip she will take to purchase it. Wearing these objects serve as a reminder (“Remember”) of what she has achieved in order to possess it, which ties in with the cloud from the first interview on the theme of an object as a reflection of yourself.
How were these clouds made?
Generating word clouds is a fairly easy process. There are various free resources that can be found with a simple Google search. I am a firm believer in the Agile Iron Triangle; in an ideal situation, you can achieve a high-quality product if you have ample time, resources, and a reasonable scope. In this situation, I do have that 9–5 job thing where I work on a different kind of cloud, which means less available time, so I had to leverage my resources. For this project, I used Otter.ai to transcribe the audio conversations and Free Word Cloud Generator to quickly visualize the clouds. I chose to spend the bulk of my time analyzing the cloud and comparing it to the interviews in order to find connections and meaningful themes.
