Data Storytelling with Animated Word Clouds

Animated word clouds turn classic word clouds into a dynamic visualization. Learn more about telling data stories in Python.

Introduction

An animated word cloud displays absolute frequencies of n-grams (contiguous sequences of text sample items) over time as a sequence of images in a video file. It gives greater importance to words that appear more frequently in a source text. The bigger and bolder the n-gram displays, the more frequently it appears in the text. It builds on the intuitive logic of classic word clouds and adds a time perspective to the visualization.

As many text datasets are collected these days as text observations over multiple periods, there is a particular challenge to visualize the changes in the data over time. Instead of making summary tables or graphs for many different periods, let’s prepare an MP4 video that tells the story, attracts the audience, and gives a “wow” effect to the presentation.

This article will describe the generation of animated word clouds from text data in Python. Here are some unique features of the AnimatedWordCloud library: