Analyzing my blog is taking longer than expected but my goal is to have something meaningful over the weekend. In the meantime I wanted to share a quick script I discovered to generate a word cloud in R. I remember doing this years back in D3 and having to spend a bunch of time figuring it out. Compared to that doing it in R is a breeze. In this case I have a CSV dump of my blog in /tmp/out.csv and am generating two word clouds - one for keywords and the other for tags of my blog posts.
# Install and the libraries
install.packages("tm")
install.packages("SnowballC")
install.packages("wordcloud")
library(tm)
library(SnowballC)
library(wordcloud)
# Read the file
df = read.csv("/tmp/out.csv", header=TRUE)
# Now generate the two word clouds.
# Most of the work here is removing the unncessary and common words
# as well as optionally stemming each of the words. In my case since
# I'm plotting the keywords and tags I ignore this step.
corpus <- Corpus(VectorSource(df$keywords))
corpus <- tm_map(corpus, PlainTextDocument)
corpus <- tm_map(corpus, removePunctuation)
corpus <- tm_map(corpus, removeWords, stopwords('english'))
# corpus <- tm_map(corpus, stemDocument)
corpus <- tm_map(corpus, removeWords, c('the', 'this', stopwords('english')))
wordcloud(corpus, max.words = 100, random.order = FALSE, scale=c(1,.5))
corpus <- Corpus(VectorSource(df$tags))
corpus <- tm_map(corpus, PlainTextDocument)
corpus <- tm_map(corpus, removePunctuation)
corpus <- tm_map(corpus, removeWords, stopwords('english'))
# corpus <- tm_map(corpus, stemDocument)
corpus <- tm_map(corpus, removeWords, c('the', 'this', stopwords('english')))
wordcloud(corpus, max.words = 100, random.order = FALSE, scale=c(1.5,0.5))
Word cloud of the tags I use.
Word cloud of the keywords I use.