Makeover Monday | Week 16 | 2019

For this week's makeover, we're collaborating with RJ Andrews on his recent book 'Info We Trust'. RJ gave me a fun word cloud and the data behind the 270 most common word-forms in the book.

Something totally different from what we normally do, but it's still 'just data' so it's a challenge worth tackling.

Here is the original which RJ managed to produce via voyant-tools:

What works well:

• It's engaging and many people are somewhat familiar with word clouds and how to interpret them (larger words mean they're more signifcant in some way)
• The most frequently used word - data - does stand out quite clearly
• It actually shows all 270 words in a very condensed space

What could be improved:

• Well, there are far too many colors and they don't seem to have a particular purpose
• It is not obvious what the viz is about, what the words relate to, etc.
• There is no title, no subtitle, no description
• Having words rotated makes them very hard to read
• Is there a meaning behind the position of each word?

What I focused on:

• Spending some time exploring the data
• Finding something interesting beyond word frequency
• I stumbled across word counts by chapter and noticed something that I was able to tie together into a little story. Yes it requires far more reading than I'd normally request of my audience, but there you go :-)
• Click for the interactive version