Generating a comparison cloud

A comparison cloud works on the same principles as a word cloud. A comparison cloud allows us to study the differences or similarities between two or more individuals' speeches or literature by simply plotting the word cloud of each against the other. In this recipe, we will study the inaugural speeches given by President Obama and former president George Bush. The two clouds provide us with a great contrast on how these individuals perceive the nation and its citizens. We require the wordcloud package as well as the tm package to generate the cloud. Note that a comparison cloud is not limited to just two individuals.

Getting ready

In order to create a comparison cloud, we will use the following two packages in R:

Get R: Recipes for Analysis, Visualization and Machine Learning now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.