Neat project! I think for this application, it would be nice if WordCloud took an argument/option for the max number of words to display in the cloud. Maybe it would be easier to understand if you take just the top, say, 20 or 25 words in each window to make a cloud with. I might also play with taking a longer DisplayDurations, while perhaps increasing the window step size from 20, if needed, to maintain dynamics. Maybe I'll try it myself when I have some time :).

This is really great, Vitaliy! Seeing the way the representation changes as the window moves through time is very interesting. It made me think of another representation -- different but quite similar.

Picture a network map which includes all the words ever used, with their spacial proximities determined by how close in time their utterances were, on average, to each other. But now represent their usage densities, within each time window, as a magnitude, and represent that as something like a color or a value (like saturation or value in the colorimetric sense), or even a height of the characters, as in a 3D histogram. Now we see a connectedness representation, as well as a time evolution. It would be interesting to follow a political campaign, or a debate, or even the conversation at a lunch table, as the discussion went from subject to subject.

Hi Vitaliy,

I liked that display.

Three ideas for visualization:

1. I don't know if you can access it, but in a play it might be nice to have the character's word clouds playing against each other to see what they are saying in sequence. Also, if a character doesn't say much the words spoken by that character will have more visual impact.

   In W|A we have the "Dialog timeline" pod

   which shows when several of the main characters speak in relation to the progression of the play.

2. Maybe something with the presidential debates could be done with word clouds from separate speeches being compared. That might also indicate how well they answer any questions posed to them. For example if the debate has a question posed about a certain subject, it would be interesting to see how often the responses to that question include reference to that subject.

3. Could you color the words by sentiment, so happy = yellow, sad = gray, peace = blue, or whatever scheme you choose (included in a legend, possibly), to see if the clouds of words spoken give a visual impact on that dimension as well?