Word clouds for text mining

Word clouds are a clever way to visualize the results of text mining. The image above is based on a combination of the texts of the United States Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.

So-called "stopwords" are removed from the text. This includes common functional words like articles, prepositions, pronouns, and forms of the verb "to be". The remaining words are depicted with the most frequently occurring words shown as the largest.