
Show HN: Python package and CLI to generate stylistic word clouds - minimaxir
https://github.com/minimaxir/stylecloud
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bquinlan
I created word cloud as a Valentine's Day gift this year:

\- [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/brianquinlan/word-cloud-
va...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/brianquinlan/word-cloud-
valentine/master/images/heartcloud.jpg)

\- [https://github.com/brianquinlan/word-cloud-
valentine/blob/ma...](https://github.com/brianquinlan/word-cloud-
valentine/blob/master/images/framedheartcloud.jpg)

My implementation ([https://github.com/brianquinlan/word-cloud-
valentine](https://github.com/brianquinlan/word-cloud-valentine)) is a lot
less sophisticated than _stylecloud_ but I think that I had a few interesting
ideas about text extraction.

I used _nltk_ to extract only nouns and to do word stemming (e.g. so that
"time", "times" and "timing" are only counted as one word).

I also experimented a lot with various method of determining word size i.e.
size proportional to frequency, size proportional to log(frequency), size
proportional to sqrt(frequency).

~~~
cjauvin
It's funny, I did exactly the same, with my Hangouts Takeout extract, a couple
of weeks ago, but didn't go as far, because I kept struggling with stopwords
and some ways to filter out uninteresting stuff (my implementation was much
more naive than yours). I'm still thinking about what other types of analysis
I could perform on that interesting dataset though (because it's so personal
after all).

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amrrs
Super awesome. I just tried Obama's inaugural speech as Linkedin Icon -
[https://github.com/amrrs/stylecloud-
demo/blob/master/obama_s...](https://github.com/amrrs/stylecloud-
demo/blob/master/obama_speech_linkedin.PNG) It came out very well!

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danso
This is a great tool! Ironically, I might use it someday to illustrate why
word clouds are an absurd format. But it'll be great for joking around too :)

~~~
meej
I wrote a paper about word clouds for my Information Retrieval class when I
was in Library School, when word clouds were still a trendy and popular
content browsing UI.

I concluded that they do have some utility as "semantic cartograms" in certain
contexts, but beyond that they're mostly just decoration. Especially the ones
created by this tool. =)

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paultopia
That looks really cool!

A while ago I tried to write some wordcloud code, but couldn't quite figure
out how to do the layout. Does anyone know where one might find a good writeup
of the algorithm that tends to be used for this?

~~~
dwyerm
You might look through the source code for Wordcram[1]. It is built under
Processing, and is relatively easy to understand, I think.

[1] [http://wordcram.org/](http://wordcram.org/)

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chrisweekly
Beautiful! Thank you for creating and sharing this! :)

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foobarbecue
Presumably this person means "stylish," not "stylistic"?

~~~
jedberg
Stylistic is probably the right word here: of or pertaining to style,
especially to linguistic or literary style

~~~
foobarbecue
I know what the word means, and I don't see how it could possibly make sense
here. If he doesn't mean stylish, he might mean stylized.

What could "word clouds pertaining to style" possibly mean? Maybe if you gave
it a text and it spit out a cloud with things like: "using passive voice,"
"flowery," "strident," "long-winded," "plain."

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klysm
I believe word clouds are one of the most useless presentations of data that
are widely used

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calmworm
Very impressive! Well done!

