Sunday, July 20, 2008

Visualising Text

Does anyone know of a simple way to visualise lots of comments taken from people in a open-ended survey questions and visualise them like a tag-cloud? - i know there are sophisticated packages for conducting thematic analyses using this type of data but Im looking for something very simple for the purpose of a presentation.

In general, what can be usefully done with this type of data - for example i have 12,000 or so open-ended replies about the most important issues in higher education as derived from the students in a big survey. Im not thinking of submitting this to Econometrica but i am interested in the results and some simple ways to present them with a view to guiding survey design.

3 comments:

Joris said...

wordle?

Stephen Kinsella said...

SPSS text analysis is good for that sort of thing. Here's how Stephen Wolfram displays his emails over time: http://www.stephenwolfram.com/scrapbook/internals/page7/5.html

Also, here's a cool blog that seems to address those kinds of issues. http://datamining.typepad.com/

Gerard O'Neill said...

Here's one we've been using ourselves, it can handle up to 3mb of text (and it's free):

http://tagcrowd.com/

As our American cousins would say - it's awesome!