Text visualization refers to visually representing textual data meaningfully and interpretably. It transforms textual information into visual representations. These may include charts, graphs, word clouds, network diagrams, and other visual formats. With the onset of big data and its many uses, text visualization techniques help users gain insights, identify patterns, and extract useful information from large volumes of text data.
Text visualization serves several purposes, including summarization of extensive unstructured data, exploration of trends and patterns in data, and communication of text analysis results. As a text analysis technique, text visualization has gained plenty of traction as many executives prefer such information visualization to the usual reports filled with numbers. This article helps those who want to use text visualization as their go-to data analysis technique.
The blog post’s content is divided into three main sub-sections, which include the types of text visualization techniques, their benefits, and how to employ data visualization in your company. The blog is a comprehensive guide about text visualization and how to conduct it for the continuing growth of your organization.
Types of Text Visualization
The first section of this blog covers the types of text visualizations essential to know if you want to employ data visualization at your company. Different text visualization techniques are suited to different scenarios; thus, understanding their usage is critical for their correct deployment.
Word Clouds
Word clouds represent text data by displaying words in different sizes, with larger sizes indicating higher frequency or importance. This text visualization technique offers a quick and intuitive way to identify frequently occurring terms within a text corpus. The apparent use of word clouds is for content analysis, where a product researcher or SEO analyst wants to check which words occur more frequently in a given text. Other uses include social media analysis, where companies sift through posts to find relevant insights related to their brand or products.
Heat Maps
These text visualizations help analyze relationships between multiple variables. Heat maps display the similarity between different entities by showing similar terms with a similar color. By using more color shades, the heat maps can distinguish between similar and dissimilar terminologies. The primary use of heat maps is when websites find out what section of the page users are frequently clicking on. Similarly, it can be used with customer geo locations to present a data visualization of where the shopping hotspots are.
Scatterplots
Scatterplots are similar to heat maps, but instead of representing the different entities with color shades, they represent entities as nodes. Such nodes can then be visualized and linked to show linkages or drawn on a chart to find correlations between all entities. The most common usage of scatterplots is obtaining text visualizations that can be easily interpreted to find correlations between entities, such as finding outliers.
Network Graphs
Network visualizations use nodes and edges to illustrate relationships between entities, such as words, topics, or authors. They reveal connections, co-occurrences, and dependencies within textual data, providing insights into the underlying structures. Network graphs are a great way to visualize how all entities are connected. They’re used to find out the social media connectivity of clients or website users and how they are interconnected. The most common usage is in SEO, where search engine rankings and the spread of information can be gauged through the linkages.
Tree Maps
Treemaps are a text visualization tool showing text data’s hierarchical structures. They show how different topics or categories are nested within each other, providing a clear overview of the organization and distribution of information. The most important use of treemaps as an information visualization technique is showing the market shares of competing brands and companies. Such illustrations help executives learn of their competition and standing in one simple visual. Treemaps also help chart out popular pages of a website and the ones that require more attention.
Bar Charts
These data visualizations display a dataset’s frequency distribution of specific terms or topics. They allow for easy comparison and identification of the most common or relevant elements. It best represents discrete data into easily understandable rectangular units that can then be either arranged in increasing or decreasing order. Survey results and feedback forms based on definitive point scoring can be easily shown via bar charts which are still a popular data visualization method.
Word Embedding
These data visualizations stem from the latest natural language understanding methods, where the context and meaning of words are placed in a vector space to show their correlation. Each entity or word is represented in this vector space by assigning them absolute coordinates, plotted based on their similarities and contextual closeness. Near entities are similar, while those farther away from are less likely to be similar. Word embedding is a relatively new technique that enables companies to understand a text corpus and its relations.
