How to make a Word Cloud in R

In this video, I’ll guide you through using the wordcloud2 package in R. Despite a few minor issues, it comes with a range of unique and practical features that you won’t find in other packages. Throughout the tutorial, I’ll showcase various visual options using the package’s demo data. I will then teach you how to effectively extract word frequencies from text data using the tm package and the Friends TV show data as an example.

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library(wordcloud2) 
library(tidyverse)

# simple example
head(demoFreq)
wordcloud2(data=demoFreq)

# Change the background color
wordcloud2(demoFreq, color='random-light', backgroundColor="black")

# angles
wordcloud2(demoFreq, minRotation = -pi/6, maxRotation = -pi/6, rotateRatio = 1)

# Change the shape:
wordcloud2(demoFreq, size = 0.5, shape = 'star')
wordcloud2(slice_max(demoFreq,order_by = freq, n=50), 
           size = 0.5, shape = 'circle')



## More complex setup example using Friends scripts #####
library(friends)
library(tm)

# Rachel Green Phoebe Buffay Monica Geller 
# Joey Tribbiani Ross Geller Chandler Bing
# filter speaker and isolate dialogue 
sentences<- friends %>% filter(speaker=="Ross Geller") %>% select(text)

# use tm package, create a Corpus 
docs <- Corpus(VectorSource(sentences))

# use tm to remove punctuation, stopwords, case etc. 
docs <- docs %>%
  tm_map(removeNumbers) %>%
  tm_map(removePunctuation) %>%
  tm_map(stripWhitespace)
docs <- tm_map(docs, content_transformer(tolower))
docs <- tm_map(docs, removeWords, stopwords("english"))

# create table of word counts
dtm <- TermDocumentMatrix(docs) 
matrix <- as.matrix(dtm) 
words <- sort(rowSums(matrix),decreasing=TRUE) 
df <- data.frame(word = names(words),freq=words)

#make wordcloud
wordcloud2(slice_max(df, order_by = freq, n=200), size=0.4, 
           color='random-dark')


# right click in RStudio to save or use webshot package
# install webshot
library(webshot)
webshot::install_phantomjs()

# Make the graph
my_graph <- wordcloud2(demoFreq, size=1.5)

# save it in html
library("htmlwidgets")
saveWidget(my_graph,"tmp.html",selfcontained = F)

# and in png or pdf
webshot("tmp.html","fig_1.png", delay =5, vwidth = 480, vheight=480)