Here I played with data visualization. I decided to make a word cloud based on Thomas Paine's Common Sense. I was curious to see if the theme of the text would come through based on the word cloud, and while I believe the general theme of the text does come through, I found that word clouds are not the most effective means of data visualization.
To create this word cloud I used the Rita.js library. I also was sure to remove stop words (which are words like "the" and "and") from the word cloud as those would not help to reveal any themes of the text.
I intentionally left the words in shades of grey to give the real feeling of a book.
Because the word cloud itself is more of a visual experience in data rather than a meaningfully informative one, I decided to play that aspect up and make it interactive. As you click the image of the word cloud, the words are redraw again over the previously drawn words. When this is done enough times you get an interesting visual full of words, as seen below.
