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Creating a Clickable Word Cloud with Shiny

Mandy Norrbo builds a word cloud:

Word clouds are a visual representation of text data where words are arranged in a cluster, with the size of each word reflecting its frequency or importance in the data set. Word clouds are a great way of displaying the most prominent topics or keywords in free text data obtained from websites, social media feeds, reviews, articles and more. If you want to learn more about working with unstructured text data, we recommend attending our Text Mining in R course

Usually, a word cloud will be used solely as an output. But what if you wanted to use a word cloud as an input? For example, let’s say we visualised the most common words in reviews for a hotel. Imagine we could then click on a specific word in the word cloud, and it would then show us only the reviews which mention that specific word. Useful, right?

Read on to see how you can create one of these.