Thursday, October 27, 2011

Divorce Word Cloud





Recently, I seem to have a fascination with depicting words. I have seen visualizations of words in the media. With iPhone apps people can now do things that use to take expensive software. I was please to see I could get a free app that would create word clouds. A word cloud is a visual representation for text data, typically used to depict the frequency of each word shown with font size and/or color. The assumption is that important words are larger and in a different color. The word cloud above is a visualization of the documents necessary to start a divorce action in court in Arizona. I had to increase the frequency of a word appearing to at least 20 times and taking out some common words or it would have not been readable. It is interesting to see how the words COURT and YOU are the biggest and most frequent and the word attorney is in the smallest font. The word child is somewhere in between. I am not sure if this is a significant statement about the divorce process but it certainly is interesting. Unfortunately, the word mediation did not show up at all. As I write this, I think I will do another word cloud using the Divorce Memorandum of Understanding and Consent Decree and see how it compares.

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