The Word Rain visualisation technique applied to digital history: How to visualise, explore and compare texts using semantically structured word Clouds

Abstract

The Word Rain text visualisation technique aims to retain the simplicity of the classic word cloud, while addressing some of its limitations. In particular, the Word Rain visualisation uses word embeddings to automatically give the visualised words a semantically meaningful position along the horizontal axis. In this handbook chapter, we showcase how this novel approach for word positioning makes the Word Rain technique suitable for exploring, analysing and comparing texts. More specifically, we show how the Word Rain Python module can be used to visualise longitudinal changes in periodicals published by the Swedish Diabetes Association, and how the Word Rain web service can be used to create visualisations that compare the patient organisation periodicals to journals published by the Swedish Medical Association.