R help - Jun 2009 - graphically representing frequency of words in a speech?

Dear all,

 

I recently saw a graph on television that displayed selected
words/phrases in a speech scaled in size according to their frequency.
So words/phrases that were often used appeared large and words that were
rarely used appeared small. The closest thing I can find on the web to
approximate what I saw can be found here:
http://stateoftheunion.onetwothree.net/ The example at that website is
more complicated but captures the general idea.

 

Would someone point me in the right direction in terms of replicating
such a graph.

 

Thanks in advance,

Tony

 

------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------

Tony N. Brown, Ph.D.

Editor-Elect, American Sociological Review

Associate Professor of Sociology and Human and Organizational
Development (secondary)

Program Faculty, Effective Health Communication and African American &
Diaspora Studies

Faculty Head of Hank Ingram House, The Commons

Vanderbilt University

(615) 322-7518

(615) 322-7505 fax




	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

On Jun 7, 2009, at 1:41 PM, Brown, Tony Nicholas wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I recently saw a graph on television that displayed selected
> words/phrases in a speech scaled in size according to their frequency.
> So words/phrases that were often used appeared large and words that  
> were
> rarely used appeared small. The closest thing I can find on the web to
> approximate what I saw can be found here:
> http://stateoftheunion.onetwothree.net/ The example at that website is
> more complicated but captures the general idea.
>
> Would someone point me in the right direction in terms of replicating
> such a graph.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Tony
Tony,

What you are referring to is called a 'tag cloud'. See this page:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud

They are commonly used on wikis, Twitter and so forth. For example:

   http://tweetstats.com/trends


The only thing that I found for R is by Gregor Gorjanc, but the  
information seems to be dated:

   http://www.bfro.uni-lj.si/MR/ggorjan/software/R/index.html#tagCloud

I have cc'd him here for any updates.

Otherwise, there are some links on the Wikipedia page and some other  
applications such as Wordle:

   http://www.wordle.net/

HTH,

Marc Schwartz

Hi,

As Gregor Gorjanc mentioned, it's very inconvenient to let R decide
the fontsize and placement of words in a plot. There have already been
very mature applications of tag cloud; one of them I'm relatively
familiar is the WordPress plugin "wp-cumulus", which makes use of a
Flash object to generate tag cloud, and it has fantastic 3D rotation
effect of the cloud. I've spent a couple of hours porting it into R;
see the source code and effect here:

http://yihui.name/en/2009/06/creating-tag-cloud-using-r-and-flash-javascript-swfobject/

HTH.

Regards,
Yihui
--
Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
Phone: +86-(0)10-82509086 Fax: +86-(0)10-82509086
Mobile: +86-15810805877
Homepage: http://www.yihui.name
School of Statistics, Room 1037, Mingde Main Building,
Renmin University of China, Beijing, 100872, China



On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 2:41 AM, Brown, Tony
Nicholas<tony.n.brown at vanderbilt.edu> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
>
>
> I recently saw a graph on television that displayed selected
> words/phrases in a speech scaled in size according to their frequency.
> So words/phrases that were often used appeared large and words that were
> rarely used appeared small. The closest thing I can find on the web to
> approximate what I saw can be found here:
> http://stateoftheunion.onetwothree.net/ The example at that website is
> more complicated but captures the general idea.
>
>
>
> Would someone point me in the right direction in terms of replicating
> such a graph.
>
>
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Tony
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> -----------------------------------------------------
>
> Tony N. Brown, Ph.D.
>
> Editor-Elect, American Sociological Review
>
> Associate Professor of Sociology and Human and Organizational
> Development (secondary)
>
> Program Faculty, Effective Health Communication and African American &
> Diaspora Studies
>
> Faculty Head of Hank Ingram House, The Commons
>
> Vanderbilt University
>
> (615) 322-7518
>
> (615) 322-7505 fax
>
>
>
>
> ? ? ? ?[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
> ______________________________________________
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