5 - Word clouds as creative data analysis – what can they tell us about student views of learning something new?

Summary

Introduction

This chapter focuses on the application of word clouds as a method of creative data analysis. Word clouds are a method of visualising textual data, where the frequency of words in the analysed text is related to their size within the visualisation or word cloud (McNaught and Lam, 2010). It is important to note that this is a collaboratively written chapter, all three authors have a practitioner/ teacher background as well as research experience. However, neither our perspective nor position is singular. We would describe ourselves as relatively pragmatic, fluid, and creative in relation to research design and methods to address different research questions appropriately. Our positionality in relation to the creative data analysis using word clouds in this chapter is a shared one and was reached through collaborative discussion of the data. The holistic nature of pragmatic approaches, which acknowledge and engage with complexity and practicability (Clarke and Visser, 2019), are cognisant with the complexity of the research focus (metacognition) and data in the research that will be described in this chapter. Figure 5.1 is an example of a word cloud that provides a visual summary of this chapter by illustrating the frequency of the words used, acting as a visual abstract.

We see word clouds as an inherently mixed method due to the statistical algorithm used to generate the words in the cloud, which are then presented visually and can be subjectively interpreted. Aspects of the presentation of the ‘cloud’ are configurable, such as the relative size and direction of the words and the minimum frequency for inclusion. Word clouds have been described as increasing in popularity since the early 2000s (Viegas et al, 2009; Henderson and Segal, 2013), although research literature about their utility is relatively sparse. In terms of how they have been used, word clouds have been described or used as a ‘supplementary’ method of analysis (Dietz, 2016), as a means of engagement with content (Viegas et al, 2009), and, pertinent to the example in this chapter, as a means of visualising qualitative data (Henderson and Segal, 2013). The purpose of this chapter is to describe and explain how we used word clouds as a means of creative data analysis.