Word clouds or tag clouds are graphical representations of word frequency that give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in a source text. This type of visualization can assist evaluators with exploratory textual analysis by identifying words that frequently appear in a set of interviews, documents, or other text. It can also be used for communicating the most salient points or themes in the reporting stage.
Word clouds are an easy to use and inexpensive option for visualizing text data. One of the challenges of interpreting word clouds is that the display emphasizes frequency of words, not necessarily their importance. Word clouds will not accurately reflect the content of text if slightly different words are used for the same idea (for example, ‘large’, ‘huge’, ‘giant’, ‘enormous’, and ‘big’). The context is generally not provided, so the meaning of individual words may be lost. Due to these limitations, word clouds are best suited for exploratory qualitative analysis.