[R] graphically representing frequency of words in a speech?

[Marc Schwartz]

On Jun 7, 2009, at 1:41 PM, Brown, Tony Nicholas wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I recently saw a graph on television that displayed selected
> words/phrases in a speech scaled in size according to their frequency.
> So words/phrases that were often used appeared large and words that  
> were
> rarely used appeared small. The closest thing I can find on the web to
> approximate what I saw can be found here:
> http://stateoftheunion.onetwothree.net/ The example at that website is
> more complicated but captures the general idea.
>
> Would someone point me in the right direction in terms of replicating
> such a graph.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Tony

Tony,

What you are referring to is called a 'tag cloud'. See this page:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud

They are commonly used on wikis, Twitter and so forth. For example:

   http://tweetstats.com/trends


The only thing that I found for R is by Gregor Gorjanc, but the  
information seems to be dated:

   http://www.bfro.uni-lj.si/MR/ggorjan/software/R/index.html#tagCloud

I have cc'd him here for any updates.

Otherwise, there are some links on the Wikipedia page and some other  
applications such as Wordle:

   http://www.wordle.net/

HTH,

Marc Schwartz