Making animated word clouds

Recently I ran across a post about creating an Animated WordCloud for Alice in Wonderland and thought, that looks like fun. So I ran my novella through this code, which breaks the text up into 500-word chunks and makes a word cloud for each chunk, then strings them together into an animated gif.

It’s bizarrely entertaining to watch the plot of the novella go by as a word cloud.

Here’s the first image:

I removed the main character’s name from the word clouds because the novella is in 3rd person. As it is, her brother Stebbin is the biggest item for the vast majority of the book.

Here’s Stebbin later on, appropriately surrounded by an ice squid (and tentacles):

This totally counts as productive writing time.