Word Clouds Are Lame

Shelby Temple
Towards Data Science
7 min readMay 12, 2019

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Exploring the limitations of the word cloud as a data visualization.

Author: Shelby Temple; Made with Tableau

Word clouds have recently become a staple of data visualization. They are especially popular when analyzing text. According to Google Trends, it seems that the rise in popularity started around 2009 with search term interest currently just under bar charts.

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