I decided to do the “Textual Analysis” part for this week’s assignment. The article I chose was “Excavating the Video-Game Industry’s Past” by Ted Trautman. The reason I chose this article was mainly because I love video games and have loved video games since I was a child, but I also wanted to learn more about how the video-gaming industry has evolved.

The main thing that I see from this wordcloud is that Atari is the most used word in the article, followed by games, game, and console. The reason this is interesting is because I obviously know what the Atari is, but I didn’t really know too in depth about the past of video games, but instead the more modern part of it. The words that are used the most obviously tell you what the article is going to be about specifically, but you also can’t base it off that alone. You still have to be able to analyze the words collaboratively and not each word for it’s own. The wordcloud also shows some depth to the article and gives a good insight about what you are going to read (if you haven’t read the article already of course). The theme of the article is how the video-gaming industry has developed since the past.

The reason I chose a controller shape to showcase this article is because it is basically what represents video games nowadays. A question that I have about the wordcloud is how do they know the right way to format the words together, specifically choosing words that are relative to each other? I have never heard of wordcloud before, which is surprising I know, but it seems like a really fun tool to play around with and use, as well as being useful in other ways too.