3.3 Cirrus Word Cloud

One of the most eye-catching parts of Voyant for me, and dominant in the left-hand upper corner of your screen, is the “Cirrus Word Cloud Tool”. You can see the expanded terms list both at the bottom of the Voyant in the “distinctive words list” and in the Cirrus word cloud. The word cloud is a great tool I like to use to get a general idea about the kinds of topics my corpus is bringing up, as well as visualizing these main themes in a pretty direct and digestible way. Here’s more detail on the tool itself below!

Cirrus tool- this tool shows you a word cloud of common terms across your corpus. Depending on your research interests, you can use the bar at the bottom of your screen to enlarge the number of terms in the cloud or shrink the number of terms. I recommend setting this number past the minimum it gives you by default, to have a more inclusive view of your research topic.